NYT Games Boom: Latest Wordle Results, New ‘Connections’ Puzzle & Expert Tips to Keep Your Streak Alive

The New York Times’ puzzle portfolio keeps growing, and its newest arrival, Pips, shows just how central NYT Games has become to the company’s digital strategy. The single-player logic puzzle—think mini-Sudoku meets dominoes—left beta and rolled out worldwide on 18 August 2025, giving players a daily challenge to fit 28 dominoes onto a color-blocked grid while satisfying numerical rules. Pips is the first wholly original logic game the Times has built since Sudoku and caps an 18-month run that also introduced Connections, Strands and a sports version of Connections in partnership with The Athletic. Behind the stream of launches is a striking set of engagement metrics. Internal data shared with The Verge shows NYT Games recorded 11.1 billion puzzle plays in 2024; Wordle, Connections and Strands alone accounted for 5.3 billion, 3.3 billion and 1.3 billion completions, respectively. Daily active players now top 10 million across web and app, and the habit-forming nature of the puzzles is directly feeding the Times’ subscription engine: the company finished Q2 2025 with 11.88 million total subscribers, citing Games for more than 110 000 of the quarter’s new digital-only adds. The growth story isn’t over. In June the Times quietly began testing Crossplay, a Scrabble-style multiplayer word game, in New Zealand—its first stand-alone games app—while Pips continues to generate daily social chatter thanks to its emoji-based share card, a mechanic popularized by Wordle. Editors have hinted that new word and number concepts are in the research pipeline as the team leans on player feedback loops and external testers to find the next viral hit. All of this underscores a wider shift: Games is now one of the Times’ most dependable revenue pillars, with executives noting that readers who solve puzzles and read news in the same week show the highest retention rates. As competitor media outlets battle churn, NYT Games’ combination of low-friction daily rituals and subscription upsell screens offers a proven playbook. Expect more experiments—and more push alerts—soon, because the Times has made it clear that when it comes to puzzles, it’s playing for keeps.