In a significant launch, The New York Times is debuting what Jonathan Knight, the head of games at the Times, is calling “a bigger game than anything we’ve done before.”
On Wednesday the Times is launching its first two-player competitive word game … and giving it its own standalone app, as it seeks to carve out a bigger slice of the mobile gaming market.
The game is called “Crossplay,” its own take on a classic format (if you know Scrabble or Words with Friends you will instantly be familiar with the concept), and the first truly multiplayer game from the company.
“The whole history of games in the human race has been about social and social play, it’s more satisfying. It keeps you connected to the world,” says Knight in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “And I think with Wordle, we really saw that even a puzzle you solved by yourself can become very social. People gravitated toward and sort of moved their Wordle experience into their group chats. It creates connection.”
Crossplay, with its familiar format and intuitive head-to-head gameplay, was a logical next step, though Knight is quick to note that the Times has added its own twist to the game and its visual design, not to mention a postgame analysis tool called “Cross Bot” that is meant to improve the play of users.
“Look, it’s a classic format,” Knight says. “We did set about to make an original game. So we thought about the game board layout and what would make the most sense for us as The New York Times in terms of just the visual layout of the board, the logic and the math behind where all the bonus tiles go. It’s an original tile bag [with] the distribution of letters.”
Gameplay in the Times‘ Crossplay.
NYT Games
And perhaps most notably, the Times introduced a game mechanic to help end the game when the tile bag runs dry, solving one of the best known problems with those similar word games.
“We thought about how games end, which, historically in this category, is like a problem to be solved,” Knight says. “They just kind of go on and on and on. So we introduced this ‘last turn’ mechanic, which is original and we’re excited about, so I think we did a lot of things like that to make sure that the core experience was original and true to us.”
And the Times is planning a significant marketing effort for the game, leveraging the Grammy Awards as a jumping off point, with acclaimed musical artists Leslie Odom Jr., Breland and Amy Allen all participating … and challenging users to play against them, both digitally and in select real-life locations in New York and Nashville.
“Words have always been at the center of my life, from memorizing lines to writing songs,” says Odom. “Music is not just something people listen to, it is something they unpack, debate, and feel deeply. That shared love of language brings people together and continues to inspire me. Playing Crossplay feels instinctive – and thinking about words on the spot in the game is a similar process I use when writing music. As a longtime fan of New York Times Games, I can’t wait to play alongside fellow puzzlers in New York and beyond.”
And the standalone app underscores how the Times is thinking beyond its own games app as it adds functionality like competitive play to its gaming portfolio.
“You can have lots of games running in parallel, so it has its own home feed, if you will. That has your current games, your past games, other features, and then you tap into those games, and then that loads the game board,” Knight says. “Being sort of a head-to-head game, the very nature of that dictated that it really needed to have its own app, and also in the app store, we want to be able to really lead with the Crossplay story.”
Crossplay is now available for iOS and Android.