Ever have a break in class and need something new to do? New York Times games are the best ways to pass your time. With over eight games to choose from daily, there are so many options to choose from and you may not know where to start? Here is a list of all of them and my ranking from best to worst.
Wordle is one of the first ever NYT games I played and it inspired my love of playing the daily games. You have six guesses to guess a five letter word. Each guess there will be green letters: letters that are correct and in the correct spot, yellow letters: letters that are in the word but have an incorrect placement, and gray letters: letters that are not in the word at all. The game is well set up and easy to navigate. I love seeing how quickly I can figure out what the word is.
In second place we have the game Connections. Although it is my favorite to play, I hate when I lose and they have the most difficult categories that I never can never guess. Connections is a game of 16 words where you pair four groups of four words together. They are ranked from the most straightforward to tricky. They are organized by color from easiest to hardest going: yellow, green, blue, purple. Some examples of categories could be homophones, fruits, or dog commands! There are so many possible categories making the game fun because it gets you thinking.
Strands is the newest game to the New York Times and one of my new favorites. I love seeing if I am able to get the whole board without any hints. Each puzzle is a word search, except the words are not given to you. There is a theme that vaguely gives an idea to what the puzzle is about, while the spanagram is a word found that is the puzzle’s theme and touches both sides of the board. You can also find words that are not related to the theme which will help you to get a hint towards one of the words in the puzzle. Once a word is found it is highlighted in blue and those letters in that word will not overlap with another word. The spanagram is highlighted in yellow. What I like the best about the game is it makes me think more creatively, but what I do not like is that sometimes the main thing has nothing to do with what the theme is making it confusing.
The Mini Crossword is a smaller version of the New York Times most notorious game – the crossword puzzle. The mini is a timed small crossword and is a great way to challenge friends. It is an easier version of the crossword which is great because personally I could never finish a huge crossword so one with ten to eighteen words is a perfect size.
THE SPELLING BEE
The spelling consists of seven letters that you need to make words out of and one letter in the middle that needs to be used in every word. The goal is to make a bunch of words. What I do not like is usually after making five words I can’t think of any more and give up. Each four letter word gives you one point with an additional point for every letter over four. There is one word in the puzzle called the pangram which is the word containing all seven letters. There is a ranking from 0-150 of Beginner to Genius of how good your words are and how many you were able to make. I have never really loved this one and it is more of a game I play every once in a while.
If you are not into word games, Tiles is your game.This game has 30 boxes with different designs and patterns in them and you need to find similarities between them to make matches. The goal is to have a streak of making multiple tile matches in a row. What I don’t like is that after a few days the same board will come up again, it isn’t so original every day like the other games. There are switched up color themes and order of where the tiles go, but other than that after a while of playing it gets very repetitive.
LETTER BOXED
Letter boxed is a 4 sided box with 12 letters, three on each side. There are so many times when I am not able to use all 12 letters, but instead have 11 of them and just need one more. After making a word, the next word has to start with the same letter that the last word ended with. You are also not able to use letters on the same side so they need to be across from each other. I do not like when I have a good word to use and then I realize that one of the letters are next to each other and able to go after one another. I think the game is fun and very loose so you can take it in any direction you want by making whatever words you can think of.
Although it is a fun game, Sudoku usually takes the most amount of time so I find myself not playing it often. There are three different levels of easy, medium, and hard. To play you need to fill in numbers in each box and row from one-nine with no repeats in each box of row. It is a fun activity if you have a lot of time to spare. However because it is very time consuming, I don’t find myself playing it often.
