New York Times Puzzles

Graphics by Anika Dua

We all remember the Wordle craze back in early 2023. Times were good. I saw endless streams of peoples' boards each day, then I would judge everyone who took more tries than me because they’re clearly less intellectually gifted than I am. 

But after a few months, it seemed like Wordle had died out. Nobody was asking how many tries it took you to get the Wordle, and no one cared what your favorite first word was anymore. 

Until a few months ago when social media was taken over once again by the New York Times Games because of new games like Connections and the Mini. 

The world was instantly captivated once again. 

Now, if you’re one of the rare people left in the world who hasn’t heard of these new games, you have to go check them out. 

Most daily NYT gamers have their own routine of how they play these games. Maybe you do it on your walk to work or class. Maybe you stay up until midnight and do them right when they release. Maybe you do them sitting in your intro to Psychology lecture. 

And then, of course, you have to decide the order you play the games in. My personal favorite, and objectively correct, way of playing these games is to start with the Wordle (get the brain juices flowing,) then do the Connections (my best of the games,) then the Mini (you need your brain to be moving to get this one with a good time), then treat yourself to a game of Sudoku, Tiles, or Vertex. It’s also not wrong to throw in a game of Spelling Bee or Letter Boxed every once in a while, but I usually will open them, judge their difficulty, and then decide how much I want to ruin my day by attempting to solve them. 

We’re not sure why the phenomenon of these games have taken off again, but they are able to keep people’s attention by creating constant buzz on social media. When the Connections has an impossible category on any given day, it ends up all over Twitter. And there are always TikToks of people solving these puzzles, giving a piece of their mind to the creator, or just sharing how fast they solved the games that day. 

The word of mouth on these games is crazy, but we can’t get enough. We’re all fully obsessed.