Instead, the digital games are meant to bring in a different audience by being more accessible than the crossword. And in fairness, the aforementioned subscribership figure indicates that a lot of people were willing to pay for the crosswords alone. A Times representative did not specifically respond to a question about whether any complaints about the subscription cost led the company to introduce games to the package. Spelling Bee and Letter Boxed are part of an effort to attract more crossword subscribers. The honeycomb at the heart of Spelling Bee. (A crossword subscription costs $6.95 per month or $39.95 annually there’s a half-price discount for people who are already print or digital Times subscribers.) A month after debuting Spelling Bee, the company announced that it had topped 400,000 subscribers to the crossword section - twice as many as there were two years prior. Von Ehren said it is currently doing “better than we had hoped,” especially considering that so far, people have heard of the game primarily through word of mouth.Īt the same time, putting something on the Times’ crossword page means it will get plenty of eyeballs. The company soft-launched another one, Letter Boxed, in mid-January.
First ever nytimes crossword archive android#
In May 2018, the Times expanded the section - which requires a fee separate from that of a subscription to the newspaper itself, and is available on the web as well as on Android and iOS devices - with a subscriber-exclusive word game, Spelling Bee.
First ever nytimes crossword archive archive#
In addition to the daily puzzle, and a crossword archive that goes back to 1993, the Times’ crossword section offers three daily logic puzzles - sudoku, KenKen, and Set - that are free for everyone. The crossword in question isn’t any old crossword it’s the New York Times crossword puzzle, which is an institution so renowned and revered that its longtime editor is a minor celebrity who was the focus of a 2006 documentary. “We live in the shadow of the crossword,” Von Ehren told Polygon in a recent phone interview. Game designer Sam Von Ehren has a problem: He knows he’s always going to play second fiddle.
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