I have long dreamed of a better world. A world where when you unlock your phone you get a notification that your grandma has challenged you to a game of Scrabble. I’m at my wit’s end. She would play her stuff. We played it over and over again for several days, and in all that time neither of us had to face the overwhelming Technicolor ads with deceptive skip buttons that show even more pop-ups. It’s a simple life.
You might think that such an app already exists. That would be a mistake. Until now. (Zynga, I will never forgive you for what you did to Words With Friends).
Finally, The New York Times Games has made my little dream a reality with a Scrabble-like multiplayer app called Crossplay. Currently available on iOS and Android.
Crossplay isn’t exactly a Scrabble clone, but unless you’re the type of Scrabble fan who likes to participate in tournaments or memorize Scrabble dictionaries, it’s basically Scrabble. The game board and tile distribution is a little different, and the rules have changed a bit as to what happens when you run out of tiles in your bag. These differences may have been made for legal reasons. As a casual player, I barely noticed them.
Like other social word games, cross-play lets you invite friends to play or match you with strangers who are close to your skill level. If you are a New York Times Games subscriber, the game will not display any ads, but free users may see banner ads. Still, it’s better than paying $10 a month to remove ads from Words With Friends, but you still have to deal with the cartoon-like interface and other annoying features.
Scrabble purists may quibble about the slight change in the rules, but they may also rejoice at a feature in the game called CrossBot. Similar to WordleBot and ConnectionsBot, CrossBot analyzes each move in the game to determine where you made a better move. It ranks your gameplay in terms of both luck and strategy, highlighting both your best and failed moves.
The New York Times has been publishing crossword puzzles since 1942, but after crossword puzzles became a hot topic in 2022, it acquired Wordle, and its digital game business took off. Users will spend more time on gaming apps than actual news apps by the end of 2023, according to data from ValueAct Capital, a hedge fund that invests in The Times.
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I’m not the only one who has been craving a multiplayer word game without the awful distractions. Jonathan Knight, head of gaming at the New York Times, believes this is what has made the company’s gaming department so successful.
“Games like Spelling Bee and Wordle have found a way to take that magical ‘puzzle-solving’ feeling and create a very mainstream, quick and easy-to-eat version that works well on mobile, is very shareable with friends and family, and is very time-respecting,” Knight told TechCrunch. “I just decide whether I want to do it in the morning or before I go to bed at night and then go to bed.”
According to the New York Times, Wordle was played 4.2 billion times in 2025, and Connections was played 1.6 billion times.
When TechCrunch interviewed Wordle creator Josh Wardle just before selling the game, he shared a similar mindset to Knight. He told us, “People obviously have an appetite for things that they’re not asking you for anything.”
Sure, publicly traded companies like the New York Times aren’t as pure-hearted as the indie developers who make games for their partners, but the spirit of the game remains the same. Knight said that even after the Wordle moment passed, people continued with their daily habits.
“Our share rate on Wordle, the percentage of users who share daily, has not changed since we acquired the game,” he said. “This is a great way to bring people together. You can see the Pope talking about Wardle, sharing it with the brothers.”
Now, Knight’s team wants to extend the quiet simplicity of that gaming philosophy to cross-play.
“We wanted people to be able to come and play games with their friends and family and then go on with their day,” he said.
