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NEW YORK - For New York Times subscribers who love puzzles as much as the news, Wednesday marks the arrival of Crossplay, a new Scrabble-like game from the paper’s popular Games unit.
What is Crossplay?
Dig deeper:
The Times' popular Games unit is debuting Crossplay, a Scrabble-like electronic feature that represents its first designed multiplayer game. It becomes the website's 11th game, joining a lineup of puzzles that were collectively played over 11.2 billion times in 2025.
Puzzles, contests and games aren't novel for newspapers; The Times introduced its crossword puzzle in 1942 and it went digital in 2009. It was late last decade when its spelling bee game proved popular, particularly among people intimidated by the crossword.
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The enduring popularity of the board game Scrabble points to Crossplay's potential, and improving on the ad-choked Scrabble Go app would seem a low bar to surmount. The games are similar, though there are some small differences in how Crossplay is played — how the game board is designed and some letter values, for example.
People can invite friends to play or compete against a computer, keep track of records and engage with the Cross Bot feature, which gives a postgame analysis and tells players about moves they could have made to score more points. Unlike some of the other individual Times games, people can download a specific Crossplay app.
Big picture view:
Ancillary products like Games, a cooking app and the Wirecutter product recommendations have fueled remarkable digital growth at The Times over the past decade.
"It has been a huge boon to the journalism," said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University professor. The Times says it has about 3,000 journalists on staff, its most ever and more than twice what it had a decade ago. It is thriving at a troubled time for the industry: More than 350,000 journalists worked at U.S. newspapers in 2005, and that number was down to 91,550 last year, according to Northwestern University.
By the numbers:
The Times likens itself to a solar system. The newspaper is the sun, with the other products the planets revolving around it.
Some have jokingly referred to it as a game company that happens to have news. The research company YipitData reported in 2023 that subscribers spent more time in Games than they did with the digital newspaper (the company didn't respond to questions about whether it had more current data).
The Times reported 12.33 million subscribers by the end of last September, up 9% from 2024 and all but about a half million of them digital. Subscription revenue for digital-only products increased by 14%. About half of Times subscribers buy a $30 monthly package that bundles all of its products, the rest buy portions of what it offers a la carte. Last year saw a decrease in people subscribing to just the news.
The Source: The Associated Press contributed to this report. The story is based on interviews with New York Times executives and outside media experts, along with company-reported data and industry research. This story was reported from Los Angeles.