🧩 What NYTimes Knows About Games


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Dear Reader,

You're reading the monthly newsletter from Amuse Labs, covering the world of puzzles, publishing and updates to PuzzleMe™, the most advanced digital platform for smart games.

Picture Credit: The New Yorker

A Holiday Puzzle Feast

We saw some exciting holiday puzzles in December. From large grids to unique themes, here are some special grids released in the run-up to 2024:

The New Yorker’s Cartoons and Puzzles Issue had some delightful puzzles. Track Maintenance was a split decisions puzzle beautifully themed with New York subway art. Lost in Central Park was another unique puzzle that used PuzzleMe's ability to support zigzag paths through the grid.
The Globe and Mail released a Giant Holiday Crossword Puzzle, a 69x69 grid to give readers something to keep them busy during the holidays. We worked with them to ensure a smooth online experience for the grid. Invite a friend with multiplayer mode and get cracking on this feast of a puzzle.
The Irish Times is running its annual Christmas Jumbo Crossword contest for subscribers. The 4-week long puzzle contest ends in mid-January, and the winners will receive five-star hotel vouchers. The Times is using PuzzleMe’s contest mode to keep track of scores and create a leaderboard.

The Inside Story of What Games Do for The New York Times

Vanity Fair recently published a feature story titled “Inside the New York Times’ Big Bet on Games”. The story has a ton of insights on games and publishing. Here are some highlights on how games fit NYT's revenue goals:

The games section serves as a powerful funnel for the Times to acquire new users, according to the company’s Chief Product Officer, Alex Hardiman. A significant number of the NYTimes games users end up buying the NYTimes bundle, which includes news, cooking, podcasts and more.
NYTimes subscribers who engage with both news and games show the highest long-term retention rates. This shows just how important it is to engage new subscribers with games along with other parts of your bundle.
The Times plugged Spelling Bee in a popular newsletter with millions of subscribers, which helped open the game up to a wider audience. The success of Spelling Bee led The Times to adopt a "portfolio of games" approach, which helped them add players to their existing crossword audience.

Games for Local Audiences

The Daily Memphian has launched a series of games themed on news and events around Memphis, Tennessee. They are running Word Searches, Crosswords, WordroWs and Jigsaws.

The games serve as an extension to their editorial focus on the city of Memphis. The latest Jigsaw, for example, is a picture of a musical showdown between two local universities. The WordroW, on the other hand, asks the audience to guess the headline for an important local story.

In the context of local media, games can become forces that bring communities together, offering avenues for members to put their shared knowledge to use. We’re thrilled to support The Daily Memphian in attracting and sustaining a local audience.

From the Crossworld

The finals of the Indian Crossword League took place in Bengaluru last weekend, and a bunch of us were there. Our puzzle editor Sowmya Ramkumar, who writes the crosswords on Gulf News and the India Mini, came 7th in the contest.

Inkubator, an outlet dedicated to publishing puzzles by women and nonbinary constructors, has shut down. In the last 5 years, Inkubator played a crucial role in making the Crossworld more inclusive, and their presence will be sorely missed.

Registrations for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) are now open. We’re delighted that we get to make the tournament accessible to solvers around the world with PuzzleMe. We also worked with ACPT to make its entire archive available for solving online, which you can access here.

PuzzleMe Spotlight

Features for Enterprise Customers

1. Enterprise-grade Security

PuzzleMe uses an iframe model to embed games in your website, creating a safe firewall between your website and our games. The application's security is routinely stress-tested by third-party auditors.

2. Reliable Infrastructure

We’re proud to say that PuzzleMe had 100% uptime in 2023. The platform is well-equipped for traffic surges and serves more than a million players daily. Our processes are also set up to ensure that your solvers are minimally affected by updates or maintenance activities.

3. Privacy-first by design

PuzzleMe does not collect any personally identifiable data by default, and players are identified only through anonymized IDs. If you choose to collect names or email addresses, that data is owned entirely by you. The platform complies with global privacy standards such as GDPR and CCPA.

A little more than a decade ago, our co-founder Jaya Hangal created a crosswords app for iOS that incorporated musical clips as multimedia clues. The answers were the titles, instruments or musicians associated with the clips. Called PuzzleMe Raga, the app aimed to make learning about Indian classical music fun and interesting. You can see the idea well-illustrated in this puzzle from our archives.

PuzzleMe Raga is a reminder that education has always been a part of our DNA. If you’d like to use puzzles for an educational use-case, reach out to us or try creating a puzzle yourself. We’d be thrilled to help you out.

About Us

Amuse Labs is the creator of PuzzleMe™, the leading digital platform for Smart Games. It is a B2B SaaS company trusted globally by brands and publishers, powering Crosswords, Sudokus, Jigsaws, Quizzes, Word Searches and more. Explore opportunities to partner by sending a note or applying if you’d like to work with us!

Oh, and to the journalists on our mailing list, write to us if you’d like to cover highlights from this newsletter or about Amuse Labs.