NYT Games

What reviewers actually said

Built only from these 120 real reviews (foreign ones translated). Superscripts jump to the quote here. Apple has no per-review links, so [ref] opens that app's reviews on the App Store.

1. [R1] 5/5 · US Love it: I’ve had it for years.
2. [R6] 5/5 · US Consistent and good: Love the online NYT xw puzzles.
3. [R7] 5/5 · US Simply The Best: Daily fun and challenge all in one
4. [R27] 5/5 · US Games: I enjoy the Connections, the Crossword and Wordle with my morning coffee. A great way to start my day
5. [R47] 5/5 · US One of the best parts of my day: My favorite app. From Wordle to Connections to the Crossword- I rarely miss a day. Keeps my brain sharp and a great antidote to mindless scrolling
6. [R50] 4/5 · US Perfect App: I play daily. It’s great for passing time on the commute or while waiting. Started as a complete newbie but can now solve most puzzles. Fun to do, and I learn something, too. My only quibble is that the developers recently changed it so that you can’t open the daily crossword column and swipe between the puzzle and the column. You have to keep opening and closing the column to get ba
7. [R81] 5/5 · US So fun: Challenging and fun, wish it was free
8. [R43] 4/5 · US Issues fixed: Works as expected
9. [R55] 4/5 · US July 2026 Grateful for quick response: The app was continually crashing and an app update arrived in just a few days. Back to puzzling!
10. [R66] 4/5 · US Really good app: The previously reported crashing bug has been fixed. This is a really good app for folks who love puzzles. Subscription fee is a bit high, but otherwise no complaints.
11. [R73] 4/5 · US App crashing constantly: Update: The latest update seems to have fixed the issue. The app is crashing constantly when doing the crossword. It is also sucking the battery power from my phone. Very annoying.
12. [R39] 3/5 · US Updates are awful: What have they done to the app? It crashes regularly, you can’t ‘x’ out a crossword, it forces you to quit the app, and the last update that I hoped would fix all of the introduced bugs deleted your average crossword times. I understand wanting to force people to play more crosswords, but you’ve made it unusable in the process.
13. [R40] 1/5 · US Crash: Crossword crashes constantly
14. [R41] 3/5 · US Less review requests please: Crossword crashes constantly now. I can’t get through a single puzzle now without the app closing unexpectedly.
15. [R51] 1/5 · US App closes constantly: NY Times Games app closes five or six times in the course of a puzzle on my and my wife’s brand new iPads. Unacceptable!
16. [R2] 1/5 · US Enough already: This pops up every time. Please make it stop.
17. [R22] 1/5 · US One star for constant review prompts: I’ve already reviewed this and I’m STILL getting prompts after every puzzle, go away!
18. [R28] 1/5 · US Stop asking me if I’m feeling stuck when I select check puzzle during the crossword.: Give me the ability to not have it ask if I’m feeling stuck and just have it check.
19. [R30] 2/5 · US Tired of being asked to review: Blah blah. Also not happy with latest update asking for confirmation every time I was to check puzzle
20. [R9] 1/5 · US Battery drain: Current version of the app is terrible. It completely drains my year-old iPad mini battery within an hour of use. Never had this problem before. It affects both my older pad running ios18 and the newer one on ios26. Please fix this!
21. [R17] 1/5 · US Very high battery usage: This app has always used a lot of battery on my iPhone 13, but with the latest update, it has become an absolute hog. Spending a 30 minutes in a puzzle drains 20% of my battery and it makes my phone get HOT! There must be a lot of background activity or the app is poorly optimized, because my battery health is still decent. A crossword puzzle is simple, low refresh rate, n
22. [R141] 4/5 · US Crashes when doing crosswords: Ever since the most recent upgrades, the app crashes multiple times on the iPad when doing any of the crossword puzzles, and the home page with the live status of completion isn’t updating in real time. The iPad also runs very warm when doing the crosswords. I don’t have trouble doing the Wordle or other games.
23. [R12] 3/5 · US Very annoying that App is no longer supported on older devices: NYT should not be forcing paying customers to buy new devices and render older devices that are otherwise perfectly ok obsolete to the point of becoming landfill
24. [R21] 2/5 · US No longer available: On my old iPad Sad day
25. [R29] 1/5 · US Doesn’t support slightly older OS: Super annoying that it doesn’t support OS 17.7
26. [R37] 1/5 · US $6/Week Subscript Death Loop “Update”: At least let us run the old one, as it is a PAID SUBSCRIPTION. This update is not supported on myApple phone.
27. [R8] 1/5 · US Unreadable clues: The new dark blue background for the crossword clues on the iPad version makes them extremely hard to read. There’s simply not enough contrast. Please go back to a lighter blue so we can actually read the clues.
28. [R10] 4/5 · US Fix the highlight color, please!: I love the puzzles but recently, the color of the clue highlight has changed to a darker shade of blue that makes it difficult for this vision-impaired player to read. Please change it back to the light blue.
29. [R23] 2/5 · US Poor interface: It seems to work OK, but the clues for the mini and midi are highlighted with in such a way to have black text on a dark blue background. That part of the app is basically unusable.
30. [R34] 2/5 · US Summer 2026 updates, xwords, ipad: Why do you keep making this worse? The dark black boxes around the current clue are terrible. The highlighting of the pertinent boxes when the theme is revealed has gone away. The completed down clues are not grayed out as they are completed. Please fix. And please don’t have the info open through the puzzle. older comments below, you don’t have to bother
31. [R3] 2/5 · US GIANT BUG in Purchased packs: When you reset a crossword puzzle that you’ve already played it no longer shows that that puzzle is unfinished. This makes it significantly harder to tell which puzzles you have not already played. Since I purchased those puzzles, I should have the right to replay them as many times as I want and it should not be difficult to do so. What the heck New York Times?? PLE
32. [R14] 3/5 · US Lost high score and streak: Because there was an issue with crossword, but they made me reinstall before posting a fix. I lost my wordle streak and higher score. Thanks for taking care of subscribers.
33. [R32] 1/5 · US Broken: Completing crosswords and it doesn’t count. If I go back in, it blank and the counter is still going. Activity when completing a word doesnt follow the settings.
34. [R36] 1/5 · US Crossword Broken: The crossword no longer keeps track of streaks and it won’t let you see the complete puzzle. I’m reporting this bug via review because the developer won’t take direct feedback. Very disappointing.
35. [R15] 3/5 · US Love it but $$$: I love these games and would pay a buck or two a month for the rest. That subscription price is beyond insane for what amounts to a pile of flash games from the 2000s.
36. [R87] 4/5 · US It’s ok 👌: It’s ok 👌 it doesn’t let me play most of the games without a subscription, which I refuse to get. I do like it but I want to be able to play more of the games on this app. 4/5 stars for being fun, but not getting the full application.
37. [R4] 3/5 · US The Acrostic puzzle needs to be online again: We miss it!
38. [R38] 5/5 · US Spelling Bee archive please: I love you but I need more Spelling Bee
39. [R49] 1/5 · US spelling bee archive is missing !!!: per title, archives for the other games are available, but for the spelling bee (my absolute favorite) it's completely gone . plz fix this, i wanna complete all the old spelling bees i missed !!!!!
40. [R54] 5/5 · US Fun but needs 1 thing: I really like all the New York Times Games, but Spelling Bee is my favorite. I wish instead of just 2 weeks, you could play all of them. On sbsolver.com there is an archive of every spelling bee so why can’t there be a full archive? This review was really negative, but I like this app way more than this review suggests.
41. [R20] 3/5 · US Not Everyone Lives in NYC: Recent updates to Games have widened the game-experience gap between East Coasters and the rest of the country. You drop a new crossword hours before the end of the day and then don’t grant streak-extending status to a puzzle solved long before midnight on the day after its nominal date. Boo! Revert to the three-most-recently-dropped puzzles rule for “gold stars.”
42. [R284] 3/5 · GB Puzzles too American: Wordle is fun, but some of the other games can become research projects on Yankee culture in order to solve. Overall it’s a nice idea but not that well executed
43. [R289] 3/5 · GB Great app but can’t use it!: It’s very frustrating, having paid an annual subscription to NYT Games, to then not be able to use this app because my iPad isn’t new enough. I can still use it on my phone but that’s not ideal. Otherwise, it’s fantastic once you switch your brain to American spelling. Spelling Bee is quite restricted by the American vocabulary, there are a lot of British words it does
44. [R11] 2/5 · US What???: Some of the puzzles make no sense 🫤
45. [R13] 5/5 · US Suggestion: Love this game. As it gets harder, It would be great if we could move the tiles around to organize into connections that I think might go together. It would make it more fun to play as it could allow me to visually see then possible connections.
46. [R75] 3/5 · US Crashing more often than ever: The app wasn’t broken and didn’t need fixing. They updated it and now the app is constantly crashing on iPad and iPhone. Extremely irritating.
47. [R98] 3/5 · US Keeps crashing: Was great, until the crosswords started crashing 5-10 times per puzzle.
48. [R53] 1/5 · US No money,no honey: So you won’t let us folks with older devices play anymore. Your values are peeking though! Shame on you for neglecting your elders!
49. [R57] 5/5 · US Spelling Bee: Would love to have an archive for the Spelling Bee! And more Crosswords to purchase that aren’t Monday or Tuesday.