All the news about daily puzzle games

The New York Times wants to shut down a copy of its popular Connections word game. The publication sent a cease and desist letter to the owner of a website that lets you make your own Connections games. The site also has a full archive of all of the NYT’s past Connections puzzles, which the NYT keeps behind a paywall.

The Connections creator website is built and run by Anthony Salazar, a freelance web developer who runs the creative studio Swellgarfo. Earlier this month, striking New York Times tech workers used Salazar’s Connections tool to make their own strike-themed puzzle. Salazar previously told me that he built the archive using the NYT’s publicly available API.

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Wordle’s success has caused an explosion in newspaper-style puzzle games, and now Words With Friends is getting in on the action. The long-running word game is adding four solo modes that can be played daily, and they’ll sound familiar to those who use The New York Times’ gaming app.

The new games include a mini crossword puzzle; a word search; Word Wheel, which is about connecting letters to create words; and a word guessing game called Guess Word. You can see what they all look like in the gallery below:

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Striking New York Times tech workers have created a “Guild Builds” page dedicated to strike-themed games you can play, including a spin on Wordle, a word search, and the custom Connections I reported on earlier today.

As part of its strike announcement on Monday, the New York Times Tech Guild requested that people don’t cross the digital picket line to play the NYT’s daily puzzle games. This collection of five other games offers an alternative if you want to support the striking workers but also do some brain teasers.

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The Weather Channel can be a very useful website, but that’s mostly true when the weather is bad. So when the company began collaborating with the Hearst-owned puzzle platform Puzzmo, it had a specific goal: to get people coming to the site even when it’s nice out. “Why would you check the weather on a sunny day?” veteran game designer Zach Gage remembers asking himself. Eventually, the Puzzmo team came up with an answer in the form of Weather Memoku, an extremely chill game that combines elements of memory, sudoku, and, well, the weather.

“A very important idea was: can we change checking the weather from being a thing you check off your to-do list, to being a chance to take a moment for yourself?” explains Gage.

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The New York Times is starting to beta test a new puzzle game called “Zorse,” as reported by Semafor. The game is a “new phrase guessing game where every puzzle is a mash-up of two phrases,” NYT spokesperson Jordan Cohen says in a statement to The Verge. As Semafor points out, the Zorse name “identifies the offspring of a zebra and another equine,” so it seems like the game will focus on wordplay like that.

Cohen says Zorse is currently only available in Canada, meaning I can’t play it myself. But my Canada-based colleague Andrew Webster gave it a shot and told me about it; the game sounds a bit like Wheel of Fortune with a puzzle-y twist.

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Wordle now has a native app for Meta Quest so that you can easily play the game in virtual reality. The free app is available for Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, and Meta Quest Pro.

Based on screenshots in a Meta blog post and an NYT video, the game looks like, well, Wordle in VR: you’ll have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. But if you have wanted to play the game in an app on your Quest, that’s now something you can do.

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Everyone seems to want in on newspaper-style casual gaming. While The New York Times is leading the way with Wordle and its iconic crossword, major companies ranging from Netflix to LinkedIn are trying to carve out a place as well. So, when game designer Zach Gage, cofounder of the Hearst-owned site Puzzmo, started exploring the space, he knew the project needed more than great games. He says the goal was to “design a website that isn’t just links to games but is in fact a deeper community experience.” That’s why Puzzmo launched last year with a handful of titles and multiplayer features like leaderboards.

Now both of those aspects are expanding with a new game that’s also introducing new ways to play — inspired by some of the biggest online shooters around.

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Strands, The New York Times’ very good word search game, has been officially added to the NYT’s Games app on iOS and Android.

For me personally, this is huge. Strands has become my favorite of the NYT’s games since it launched in beta in March, but I was annoyed that I had to bounce between the app and a browser to complete my daily Wordle, Connections, and Strands. Now, I can do all of the puzzles right in the app over my morning coffee. It’s the little things!

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Wordle is a pretty clever name for the very good word game created by Josh Wardle. But when he was first working on it in 2013, Wardle had another name in mind that isn’t quite as catchy.

“This is true: I was going to call Wordle, Mr. Bugs’ Wordy Nugz,” Wardle revealed as part of a presentation about Wordle at Figma’s Config conference on Wednesday. He also showed a slide that spelled out the name in big yellow letters. “Had I called the game Mr. Bugs, I like to think it would not have been successful.”

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I almost didn’t get Pinpoint this morning. Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales.

I’m kidding! But I have to admit something: I’ve been going on LinkedIn every day recently, and I’m having a great time. Last week, the company announced it was adding three games to its app, both on desktop and mobile, as a naked engagement ploy to get you to open the app every day. I hate to say this, but it’s working.

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LinkedIn is now in the gaming business. Starting today, users on the LinkedIn mobile app or on desktop can play one of three different games — Pinpoint, Queens, and Crossclimb. You’ll be able to play each game once per day, and after your daily session, you’ll get access to all kinds of metrics including your high score and daily streak, different leaderboards, and who in your networks has also played. The games are available here under the LinkedIn News and My Network section on desktop or the My Network tab on mobile.

Here’s a brief rundown of the three games.

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Hundreds of games inspired by Wordle, the popular web-based word puzzle, are at risk of being deleted due to copyright takedowns issued by The New York Times. As reported by 404 Media, The New York Times — which purchased Wordle back in 2022 — has filed several DMCA notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5x6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.

Two takedown requests were issued in January against unofficial Korean and Bosnian-language versions of the game. Additional requests were filed this week against Wirdle — a variant created by dialect group I Hear Dee in 2022 to promote the Shaetlan language — and Reactle, an open-source Wordle clone built using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. It was developed prior to the Times’ purchase of the game, according to its developer, Chase Wackerfuss.

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