I have long dreamed of a better world: one where I would unlock my phone to find a notification that my grandma has challenged me to a game of Scrabble. I would play my word. She would play hers. We would play back and forth over a few days, and the entire time, neither of us would have to see any overwhelming technicolor ads with deceptive skip buttons that blast us with even more pop-ups. It’s a simple life.
You would think such an app already existed. You would be wrong. Until now. (Zynga, I will never forgive you for what you’ve done to Words with Friends).
At last, New York Times Games has brought my humble dreams to life with a Scrabble-like multiplayer app called Crossplay, available now on iOS and Android.
Crossplay is not a Scrabble clone exactly, but unless you are the type of Scrabble lover that goes to tournaments or memorizes the Scrabble dictionary, it’s basically Scrabble. The game board and tile distribution are a bit different, and there’s a slight rule change around what happens once the bag runs out of tiles. Those differences may have been done for legal reasons. As a casual player, I barely noticed them.
Like other social word games, Crossplay allows you to invite friends to play, or you can get matched with strangers near your skill level. For New York Times Games subscribers, the game will have no ads at all, but free users might see some banner ads. Still, it beats paying $10 a month to remove ads from Words With Friends, yet still have to deal with a cartoon-like interface among other features that annoy me.
Behold: one game that looks normal, and one that looks like Cocomelon for adults. Image Credits:Crossplay (left), Words With Friends (right)
While Scrabble purists may quibble about the slight rule changes, they may find delight in a feature of the game called CrossBot. Like the WordleBot and ConnectionsBot, CrossBot analyzes each move of your game to determine where you may have made a better move. It ranks your gameplay in terms of both luck and strategy, then highlights both your best moves, and those where you faltered.
The New York Times has been publishing its Crossword puzzle since 1942, but its digital gaming business kicked into high gear in 2022 when it bought Wordle after it went viral. According to data from ValueAct Capital, a hedge fund that invests in the Times, users spent more time in the Games app than the actual News app by the end of 2023.
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I’m not the only one who was craving a multi-player word game without egregious distractions — Jonathan Knight, Head of Games at the New York Times, thinks this is what makes its Games vertical so successful.
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