NYT Games Expands Its Puzzle Empire With Scrabble-Like Crossplay
If you spend part of your day trying to solve Word, Relationships. Strands and more puzzles from the New York Times add another temptation to the list. (CNET has daily answers for Wordle, Connections, Strands, Mini Crosswords and Connections: Sports Edition.)
On Wednesday, the New York Times Games department launched Crossplay, an app-based game very similar to the board game Scrabble. You can play against another player or against the computer. The game can be played for free on the New York Times Crossplay app, available on iOS and Android devices. NYT Games said Crossplay was its first two-player game.
Crossplay joins a NYT Games portfolio that includes the wildly popular Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, Strands and others. The publication purchased Wordle from developer Josh Wardle almost four years agoand the game has been played more than 4 billion times in 2025. Connections, created by Wyna Liu of the New York Times for a 2023 launch, has been played more than 1.6 billion times in 2025.
The Times said that “players around the world solved more than 11 billion puzzles in the New York Times Games” in 2025.
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Jonathan Knight, head of New York Times Games, said Crossplay was an “ambitious expansion” of the app’s current gaming offerings.
“Our players already come to us every day for clever, original word games, and Crossplay builds on that foundation by introducing real-time competition and social play in a way that shares the joy of classic word games, but is designed to be unique,” Knight said in a press release. “Crossplay was designed to be focused, intuitive and truly enjoyable from the moment you open it.”
How to play
If you’ve played Scrabble, Crossplay is easy to master. Players take turns creating words by adding letter tiles onto a shared game board. Some tiles are worth more points depending on the rarity of the letter, and the point total can be doubled or tripled depending on the square on the board where you play the tile.
Crossplay is similar to Scrabble with a few adjustments.
Detailed rules are listed here, along with instructions on setting up and navigating the app.
If Crossplay sounds similar to Scrabble – invented by Alfred Mosher Butts in 1931 – well, it is. But there have been many other fakes over the years. Scrabulous has already been used for two years as a Facebook application Hasbrowhich owns the U.S. and Canadian rights to Scrabble, and Mattel, which owns the international rights, sued, forcing the developers to remove it in 2008. Words with Friends, a multiplayer computer game, is also similar to Scrabble, but the premium letters and squares have different point values.
A representative from the New York Times Games section said that Crossplay differs from Scrabble in layout, dots and tiles.
Unusual addition
Puzzle solver and content creator David Clamage, who goes by Rangsk on his YouTube channel, said Crossplay “seems like an unusual addition” to NYT Games’ suite of games.
“It’s entering a market already crowded with similar word games, and it benefits neither from the shared everyday experience nor from the robust puzzle creation, editing and testing resources of The New York Times,” Clamage told CNET. “As a content creator, it’s harder to create content around a game when players aren’t all reacting to the same daily puzzle.”
Clamage said one of NYT Games’ greatest strengths is the shared day-to-day experience, which he said seems to be lacking here.
In-game chat
But you can share your games in other ways. Crossplay competitors can communicate during a game via a chat function.
And when it comes to opponents, you can play against family and friends, but you can also challenge people you don’t know. The Crossplay app will pit you against other players with similar skill levels. You can run up to 30 different games at the same time.
Of course, AI has a role to play in Crossplay. There is a feature called Cross Bot, which can provide post-match analysis after facing another player. This analysis will highlight key moments and strategic information from the game to help players improve their skills.
