NYT Games Guide: Every Daily Puzzle Explained, and What Is Free

As it stands in November 2026, the New York Times Games line-up is a daily routine in nine main parts: Wordle for a quick word deduction, Connections for grouping, Strands for a themed word search, the Mini and the full Crossword for crosswords at two sizes, Spelling Bee and Letter Boxed for building words from a fixed set of letters, Tiles for calm pattern matching, and Sudoku for numbers. Some of those are free for everyone, some are free only in a limited form, and several now sit behind the Games subscription, which is where a lot of older guides go wrong.

What are the quick daily word games?

Wordle remains the entry point: one five-letter word, six guesses, colour feedback after each try, one puzzle a day. Connections shows sixteen words and asks you to sort them into four groups of four that share a hidden link, which might be a category, a phrase pattern or a piece of wordplay. You can make four mistakes before the puzzle ends, and solved groups are coloured from yellow, the most straightforward, through to purple, the trickiest. Strands hides themed words inside a grid of letters that you trace in any direction. Every letter is used exactly once, and the key word, the spangram, stretches across the whole board and gives the theme away once you find it. Finding ordinary non-theme words earns hints when you are stuck.

What are the word-building games?

Spelling Bee gives you seven letters arranged around a centre letter. Every word you make must be at least four letters long and must include that centre letter, letters can be reused, and longer words score more. A pangram, a word using all seven letters, earns a bonus, and ranks climb from Beginner towards Genius and, for those who find every possible word, Queen Bee. It is the line-up's great time sink. Letter Boxed is tighter and more elegant: twelve letters sit three to a side around a square, and you build a chain of words that uses every letter at least once. Consecutive letters in a word cannot come from the same side, and each new word must start with the last letter of the word before it. Solving it in two words feels brilliant; solving it in five feels like a defeat you keep quiet about.

What about the crosswords?

The Crossword is the historic core of the whole service: a full-size American crossword, 15 by 15 on most days and larger on Sundays, getting harder as the week goes on, with a digital archive of more than ten thousand puzzles for subscribers. The Mini is the same idea shrunk to a grid of usually five by five, designed to be finished in a minute or two over coffee. A mid-sized Midi crossword also now sits between them in the subscription catalogue. Both crosswords reward general knowledge and wordplay rather than letter deduction, and the Mini in particular has become a daily ritual for people who would never attempt the big grid.

What are Tiles and Sudoku?

Tiles is the calm one. You are shown tiles carrying pattern elements and asked to match identical elements between tiles to clear them and build a streak of consecutive matches. There is no timer and no vocabulary test, and it works as a palate cleanser between the word games. Sudoku is the familiar number puzzle: fill a nine-by-nine grid so that every row, column and three-by-three box contains the digits one to nine, with daily puzzles at easy, medium and hard levels. It is the only member of the main line-up that has nothing to do with words at all.

What is free, and what needs a subscription?

According to the Times' own Help Centre, readers without a Games subscription can still play Wordle, Connections, Strands and Sudoku in full each day, and Spelling Bee with limited access, meaning the free version stops you partway rather than letting you chase the top ranks. The Crossword, the Mini, Letter Boxed and Tiles are not on that free list, so they require a Games or All Access subscription. That catches people out, because the Mini and Letter Boxed were free for years and plenty of older articles still describe them that way.

A subscription also unlocks the archives, so you can play past puzzles instead of only today's, plus extras such as Wordle Bot, which reviews your guessing after a game, and weekly bonus puzzles. If you only play Wordle and Connections, you never need to pay. If the Mini is your morning habit, or you want yesterday's Strands, the subscription is the product the Times is selling you.