How the New York Times Puzzle Page Became a Daily Ritual

A quiet decade of building

The modern Games section started on August 21, 2014, twelve years ago today, when the Times launched the Mini Crossword and gave its puzzle team a proper home. Spelling Bee had debuted in the magazine that same year and moved online in May 2018. Letter Boxed arrived in February 2019. Tiles and Vertex followed that June. None of this looked like a business. It looked like a newspaper being a good host, the way a library keeps a puzzle table by the door. Even so, more than 28 million people played at least one Times game in 2020.

Wordle changes the math

Then came Wordle. Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer, built it in 2021 for his partner, Palak Shah, who loved word games, and released it publicly that October. By January, players were sharing 1.2 million results on Twitter in under two weeks. The Times bought the game on January 31, 2022, for a price reported in the low seven figures, and promised to keep it free.

The game was not merely a hit. It was a habit. Wardle had limited it to one puzzle a day on purpose, which meant millions of people were all solving the same word at the same time. When family group chats lit up with green and yellow squares every morning, the Times paid attention. Wordle alone was played 5.3 billion times in 2024, and the company says more than 10 million people now play at least one of its games every day.

Part of the secret was the sharing. A Wordle result is a small grid of colored square emoji, no letters, so you can post your morning without spoiling the answer for anyone else. The design was built to travel through a group chat, and it did. A solved puzzle became a tiny boast, and a boast is only fun if everyone is playing the same word on the same day.

The games that stuck

Wordle pulled people toward a deeper shelf. Connections arrived on June 12, 2023, asking players to sort sixteen words into four secret groups, and it quickly became the second most played game. Strands followed, in beta in March 2024 and in full that June, hiding theme words in a grid of letters. The Mini, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Tiles and the daily crossword all kept going. Across the section, 2024 brought 11.1 billion total plays, with Connections at 3.3 billion and Strands at 1.3 billion behind Wordle's 5.3 billion.

The daily puzzles are mostly free. Wordle, Connections, Strands and the Mini cost nothing to play, though the Times has pulled some of that back. The Mini moved behind the subscription in late August 2025, and Spelling Bee now limits how far free players can climb before asking them to pay. The rest sits behind a Games subscription that also unlocks the crossword archive. The free tier is the storefront, and the subscription is the sale.

Why a newspaper runs a game company

The reason is plain arithmetic. Games are now a top driver of subscriptions for a paper whose future depends on them, and staffers repeat a half-joke that the Times has become 'a gaming company that also happens to offer news.' By 2023 the company said more than a million people paid for a Games subscription, and it has kept pushing to grow that number.

Edited like a newspaper

The Times runs the games desk as an editorial operation, not an engineering one. Wordle got its own editor, Tracy Bennett, in November 2022, and the team has since swapped out answers it considered insensitive or too tangled up in the news. The word 'fetus' was pulled on May 9, 2022, and replaced with 'shine' for as many players as the company could reach, so the game could stay 'distinct from the news.' That care is part of why the puzzles feel safe. You can count on them not to sucker-punch you with the day's headlines.

What keeps people coming back is not the revenue model. It is the shared ritual. Everyone gets the same word, so a Tuesday morning in one city and a Tuesday morning in another are both talking about the same five letters. Wardle said he randomized the word order so he would not know tomorrow's answer, which means the man who built the game still plays it like everyone else, and still loses to his partner most mornings. A crossword the paper once called primitive has become the closest thing the internet has to a communal coffee break.