Morning Brew Daily - The Secret Behind Your NYT Games Addiction

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

#927: Neal and Toby chat with New York Times Head of Games Jonathan Knight to talk about the success of Wordle and how it became wildly successful. Also, an inside look into how The New York Times decides which games are worthy of being added to their slate. Then, they talk about the broader puzzle revolution that’s captured a healthy amount of loyal fans – in a time where everything is competing for your attention. The New York Times Games is introducing Bonus Puzzles! Subscribers can play fresh spins on Wordle, the Mini, Connections, and more every week. Learn more here: https://www.nytco.com/press/new-york-times-games-introduces-bonus-puzzles/  Learn more at https://www.hotels.com/morningbrew Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Vanguard investors own shares of our index funds, which own shares of the companies they invest in. Available for Vanguard Index Funds that participate in Investor Choice, Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distribator. Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, what's behind your New York Times games addiction? We talk to the guy in charge of it all to find out the secret sauce. It's Monday, September 7th. Let's ride.

Happy Labor Day, everyone. With the office closed today, we are bringing you a special holiday interview episode. So, if you're anything like us, your morning group chats have changed from actual conversation to a sea of green, yellow and gray squares. Wordle, Connections, the Mini, Spelling Bee, doing New York Times puzzles has turned into a daily ritual for millions of people. So how did that happen? And maybe more importantly, what makes a game a New York Times game?

To find out, we spoke to Jonathan Knight, the head of games at New York Times. He spent his career obsessed with games, including stops at EA in Zinga, before taking over a portfolio that now includes some of the most recognizable brain busters on the internet. We talked about the puzzle revolution, how the Times decides which games make the cut and the story behind acquiring Whartle. But before we get to the interview, a quick word from our sponsor, Hotels.com. How was your last business trip, Neil? Bad. I had to stay in a yurt with 14 other dudes. Sounds like you could use business preferences from Hotels.com.

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loyalty members 18 plus. Now, here's our conversation with New York Times head of games, Jonathan Knight. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us and sorry to interrupt your wordel playing. That's all right. I'll get back to it. Thank you. Good to be here. All right. So I have currently about seven different group chats where people send their daily puzzle scores across a bunch of different games. Those did not exist five years ago, those group chats. Why seemingly all of a sudden is everyone so into podcast? Well, yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, we've obviously at the New York Times been in the puzzle business for a very long time, so it doesn't seem like all of a sudden to us when you kind of zoom out for the historical perspective. We ran our first crossword puzzle in 1942. And, you know, it's a great story because it was, you know, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the paper felt, hey, let's give people something to kind of take their mind off of a rough news cycle. And thus the Sunday crossword was.

born and so we've been publishing puzzles for for a very long time i do think that with the acquisition of whortle which came in 2022 um you know it was a moment and it was covid it was sort of back half of covid and people were exhausted and and and divided and and along comes this just adorable game that kind of brings everybody together and uh you know it had a very clever sort of sharing mechanic that people started to use in their group chats. And then, yeah, they form these little microsocial networks with family and friends. And because the game's so good, people come back to it every day. And because it's a social moment, then it kind of keeps it going as well. So, yeah, we're like thrilled. It's been kind of an incredible phenomenon. But it can't just be COVID.

I mean, we can go outside now. And people are still playing game. So I don't know exactly what it is. There has, maybe COVID was an inflection point for a variety of games and maybe Werdle was the catalyst, but there's something super sticky about these games now in 2026 when you can also hang out with your friends and do a bunch of other things besides playing games that it's had such remarkable staying power and expanded into a lot of different types of puzzles. Yeah, that's totally right. I think, yeah, Catalyst is a good word, right? So we've been at this for a long time, but the crosswords, you know, are not for everyone.

They can be, as we were just discussing before we started, they can be hard, they can take a long time. You can get better at them, but it is a little bit of an investment. And we're really proud of our crossword offering. But I think Wardle did sort of, you know, blow the doors open on that, sort of daily puzzle phenomenon and brought it to tens of millions of people. But I would say the core concept is the same, which is it's a daily puzzle. It's made by real people at the New York Times. really matters. It's the same puzzle every day for all of us. So we're all trying to kind of solve that same, whether it's like the wordle of the day or it's that Sunday crossword. We can say,

hey, did you do the Sunday today? Oh, yeah, it was really hard. Or, hey, did you get whordle today? Oh, I got it in two. And it's a shared experience. And it sounds simple, but most games don't work that way. You know, we might be playing Candy Crush Saga together. You might be on level 9,622, and I might be on level 360, you know, we're having a kind of shared experience. We both love the product, but our daily experiences are very different. But for us, the content is the same for everyone, whether you started Wardle yesterday or you've been playing for five years. So that, I think, also just makes it a shared, you know, experience.

You know, I also happen to think that our product is very elegant, high quality. We are respectful of users and respectful of their time. The game isn't nagging you. It's not shouting at you. It's classy. And because of that, I think people are more proud to talk about their habit with us and to share it with others. And we see even celebrities sharing their stories about playing our games. And that's because they're proud of it.

They identify with it. So I think we're doing a lot of things right. So you obviously have a lot of very successful games under the New York Times umbrella, but some games have failed to take off. I'm thinking specifically like digits. What have you observed or what have you noticed on what makes a game successful versus what makes a game less successful? Yeah, great question.

And digits is not the only game that we've tested with users that we decided not to go forward with. Digits is near and dear to my heart. We really love that puzzle. We tried a couple times. And look, we just have a very high bar. I think when we introduce a new game, we intend to support it for a long time. It requires real humans to make the puzzles every day.

And so, you know, any puzzle we add to the portfolio is just, you know, it's a real cost and investment. And we want to, you know, do it well. So we're very thorough about our greenlight process. And we have lots of concepts that come in. They come in from all over the place. The team is constantly pitching new puzzle ideas. And we run them through a rigorous kind of phase gate process with a concept committee, a green light committee, all of that.

And ultimately test with users, get feedback, do beta test, look at retention. And then, you know, we just have a high bar. And if it doesn't make it, we try to make a decision quick to cut it and move on to something else and that's just part of the process. Are there specific criteria you look for when adding a new game to their portfolio? Like, do you have a checklist that says it has to be made by a human? It has to do X, Y, and Z. Like, is there, when you look at a new game, do you think to yourself, this is a New York

Times game and this is not a New York Times game? Absolutely. We have that conversation. I might describe it as, you know, filters versus a checklist. Like, we have these filters that we put the concepts through. and, you know, I would say, like, hey, is it editorially driven? Does it have real humans behind it? Do we feel like the daily content would be fresh and inspiring and clever and all of that?

You know, do we think it's going to be a good use of people's time? Like, will it fit into their daily life? You know, does it, do we think people would share it? You know, all of these things go into that kind of aesthetic. And I think also, you know, we're not going to do a racing game or a shooter, you know, So there's like, hey, is it a daily solve? You know, puzzles are meant to be solved. Games are just played.

You know, those kinds of conversations for sure happen. You know, the real, once we sort of get further along and we have something that we can put out as a beta, then we're really looking at return rates or retention. And we're sort of getting just like very rigorous and objective about, you know, are people coming back, not just the next day or the third day or the seventh day, but are they coming back 30 days later, 60 days later? Is it really habit-forming? And that's a very high bar.

We look at a lot of things that are clever and like, would you do them two or three times? Absolutely. You know, and it's hard to say no to those things because they just look great and they're fun and you do them a few times. But would you come back a month later every day? It's just a much higher bar. Do you look at it as buckets where you say we have a lot of really great language games? let's add in some more great math games or some more visual games.

Because one thing that we're pretty obsessed with right now is geography-based games. I don't know if you've heard of a game called MapTap or you just are tapping a globe. So do you ever look at it in segments like that as like, oh, we could probably branch into the geography world? Or is it just on the merits on it if it's a good game or not? No, 100% we do. And I'm fortunate that we've got a research team. You know, Juliet is our research lead. and they really help us understand categories, segments, opportunity size for these things.

Word puzzles are, it's a very big category, sort of subcategory of puzzle game, and so we've been fortunate to kind of have a lead in the word category. You know, the App Store categorizes these things, and so it does matter. You know, and also we want to have a well-rounded portfolio. So, for example, we introduced Pips not long ago, which is a logic puzzle, and it uses dominoes to you rotate the dominoes and you place him in a certain pattern to meet certain requirements on the board. And it's a visual logic puzzle and it doesn't require you to know anything about the English language. And that was intentional. We've got tiles. We've got a

Sudoku. So we want to make sure our logic puzzle offering is robust. And yeah, that leads us to think about other kinds of categories within the overall puzzle genre. One of the most powerful features about Wordle is that little emoji, shareable text that you can send to your family group chats. When you saw that, was that an aha moment that Wordle was doing this, or was that just standard game design? Because that, to me, feels like the most powerful shareability aspect. Was that, like, a learning moment for the industry? It was totally a learning moment. It was a learning moment for us. And we've, you know, follow that model with connections and with strands. And we've liked to, and, you know, we've had a lot

fun with the emoji share. We'll do things now where like on Halloween, you know, the emoji share has changed for just one day and there's little pumpkins in there or whatever. So, you know, we've internalized that. I consider that to be a future of the game. And I often talk about those group chats, you know, whether it's in WhatsApp or whatever messenger app you're using to share, you know, that surface. I feel like that's like the other half of our product experience. You know, we don't own that real estate. You know, we're there kind of rent free. But, you know, we really care about what that's like. And, you know, we don't want to junk that experience up with a lot of links or, you know,

things that would, you know, just make it not be the same kind of thing you would expect coming from our actual product. But we have, you know, experimented with that and tried to have fun with it. There's no question that that was something that Wordle uniquely did at a unique moment in time. And I would say, you know, remember, that was also like peak. Twitter, like Twitter was never the same after that sort of era. And I don't know that that could ever happen again. You know, our social networks have become fragmented. And, you know, you'd feel like you were jumping the shark if you tried to like replicate the wordal share. So I do think it was

special. And it's interesting that story. It wasn't even in the original product. It was a user in somewhere in New Zealand, I think, who wanted to share her wordal experience and came up with this idea of like, well, let me just share the grid, but without the solution so that I'm not spoiling it, but it's my little story of like how I solve the wordle. And Josh Wardle, the creator of the game, sort of incorporated that early on to the experience. So I would say it was even like a community feature. And so very difficult to kind of replicate, I think, that kind of explosive virality. I do think it's like a once-in-a-generation moment. I think it's so funny, too, how sacred it is, because you can edit it. You know, it is. It is,

literally a text message you can edit, and yet no one does. There's this aura of untouchability to it, and I love that. I love that. Collectively, we have enough trust in each other that we respect to the wordle emoji shareability. Well, have you seen those interviews with Carol Burnett and Julie Louis Dreyfus, and they're in a Charlie Staren. They're all in a group chat together, and they do Whartle every day, but Charlize Theron and Julie Louis Dreyfus have begun to a Cues Carol Burnett of cheating. And it plays out on the talk shows. It's really funny because apparently she's gotten Wordle in one like seven times and nobody

buys it. That's not possible. Yeah, not possible. All right. So I think I'm channeling the, maybe the frustrations of a lot of New York Times games players in asking this question, how much do you think about rage bait as a driver of engagement? By that, I mean an obvious missing word in spelling B. and especially obscure answer in Wordle,

a fiendish category in connections. Because when those happens, that's where you start to see the discussion and you see these games percolate into social media. Is that a strategy that you guys deploy? It is intentional from the standpoint of our editors are... Well, you listed a lot of puzzles there and different answer for different puzzles.

But the editors are keen on fresh, surprising, fun, sometimes twisted, sometimes challenging, sometimes devious puzzles every day. And that's their job is to entertain people. And, you know, when you solve a New York Times puzzle, you're not just solving any puzzle. You're sort of like, it's this feeling of accomplishment. Like, I beat those, you know, those tricksters, you know, in Manhattan. Like, I'm smarter than them. And that's a feeling that speaks to our brand as well. So absolutely. But I think, I think, like, I would say connections, the purple category, intentionally devious, misdirects. That's the nature of that puzzle.

And Winelieu is just a mastermind at that, and she took to it immediately. And it's just like very difficult to imagine a different editor doing what she did. I think with Wordle, Tracy Bennett is very thoughtful about the sort of cadence of the, you know, the easier ones, the hard ones, the waterfalls where it's just like is a tower of green and you can't get like she thinks about all of that. And, you know, with Spellingby, look, Sam Azerski has a lot of fun going online and debating with people, the hive mind about whether that word should or shouldn't have been included. At the end of the day, he's actually not, I think, trying to be devious or frustrating. I think he's trying to create a well-balanced experience where you feel like you can get to

genius and that there isn't some word that's so obscure that you would never get it, that's sort of keeping you from getting to the rank. but then for another person, that might not be an obscure word. It's like, hey, you know, that's a relatively real word, and I knew it, and it didn't acknowledge it for me. And so I'm frustrated. So that's, you know, it's a balance there. And I think he's just always trying to strike that balance.

I love when it does break through into the discourse, because the recent one that just happened was Pshaw Gate. I don't know if you, this made the way through the company, but PSH-A-W was the wordal word. And I just opened Twitter. And it felt like, you know, 20-22 again. where everyone's like, God dang it, like, Whartle, you just ruined my entire morning, and it just broke through the discourse again.

But I like when that happened, because it makes me feel like everyone's collectively, you know, playing in the same arena once more. But Pashaagate was the most recent one that I can think of. We'll be back with more Jonathan Knight right after this. Neil, you're late.

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Amazon.com slash rising dash stars. I also think in this line of questioning where it feels like you, the player, versus the New York Times editors. And I have seen your social strategy kind of adopt this where a lot more of your editors are becoming personalities. People know them by name. They're in front of the camera. They're playing the game sometimes or playing against each other. How are you thinking about turning these editors who would normally be behind the scenes into almost front-facing social media personality? Yeah, I'm so thrilled that that's happening and they're having so much fun with it. I think, you know, it's a little cliche, but like more than ever in this day and age where people are maybe struggling to figure out if content is AI generated or human generated,

we are like intentionally leaning into the human-made nature of what we do. We're investing in our editorial team. like we're so proud of them. We want to promote them. We're doing more to actually showcase this in the product. And you'll see that, you know, coming in the coming months. And this is part of our strategy for sure to not only lean into the human nature of our puzzles, but to also let people know and make sure they know that these are really made by very talented,

creative, clever editors and constructors. Have you ever thought about launching a podcast? We don't have any plans for that. I think we have talked about a lot of different ways in which we could reach audiences through different media. We just announced a collaboration with NBC to bring Wardle to television as a game show. I think that's going to be really exciting. I think if we felt that a podcast or other media could get the word out and help us reach more people, we would pursue it. But right now, I think we've got a lot still to do.

with the Instagram channel and sort of growing that. It's getting a lot of traction. I'm glad you mentioned it. So I think we're focused on keeping our eye on the ball there and the TV show. And, you know, we'll see what next year brings. Was that volunteering us, Neil? Because I'll do it. It does sound fun.

It was actually a very innocent question. But since you brought it up, yeah, sure, I'll do the crossword one. Absolutely. I wonder, too, about what it feels like to work in the game. division at this broader company that is the New York Times that is ostensibly a news business, but over recent years, subscription revenue from games has overtaken the news business in terms of what it contributes to the bottom line in the company. Do you feel any sort of pressure because of that?

Does it feel different now that you know that you are a major moneymaker for this very historic news organization? Yeah, well, quick correction. We have not overtaken the news in terms of revenue. So, you know, the news is still the soul and the heart of the business. It's the most valuable product we have, you know, not just in terms of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world and, you know, speak truth to power. Like all of those things that are so critical to the mission in New York Times are more than ever just at the heart of the company. And, you know, it's also, you know, from business standpoint, just like in terms of revenue, the most valuable products.

So, you know, sometimes games gets talked about, you know, as if it is bigger than news or something like that, and it's not. Is it a valuable contributor? Yes. Is it the strategy working? Yes. We also have a great cooking product. The athletic is a really powerful sports product. Wirecutter product recommendations.

All of these kind of lifestyle products that, you know, I think of it as a solar system. And the news is our sun. And these lifestyle products are kind of revolving around. it and the whole thing, you know, manifests in the all-access bundle, which, you know, if you purchase the bundle, you have access to all of it. It's the most valuable offering we have. And, you know, but we, as lifestyle products, we still get our kind of heat and life from that sun, the brand of the New York Times, the mission, what it stands for.

So we're playing our part in that. And, yeah, I'm really proud that games is a particularly large planet in that solar system. the strategy is working is what that means. And we get up every day. We don't just make games. We contribute to a more important mission, and that's really rewarding. So people might be interested in your background, and you come from more traditional video, mobile game background,

Words with Friends, EA, The Sims. So my question is, what did you learn from that experience, making the Sims to bring to something like Wordle? What are some of the main similarities and differences in the game mechanics and the overall user experience? You know, with games, it's a tough business. And I think the one thing, I've been added a really long time, and probably the one thing I've learned is that you get into trouble when you think you know too much.

And with every new cycle and every new opportunity, you have to treat it, you know, you have to come at it for what it is and what it's trying to do. And maybe your pattern matching to things you've learned over. your career, but it would be a mistake for me to try to apply, you know, some sort of formula or some sort of playbook, you know, from other games experiences. And I think even within the games industry, people who are successful have a kind of humility when they come to the next project that my last project may have been successful or maybe it was a failure.

I'm learning all along the way. But if I, you know, think that my past successes are going to mean future successes. sort of just on their own. I'm usually going to get myself into trouble. So that was more my orientation versus, you know, bringing something from the Sims or Farmville. Okay, we have a couple of rapid-fire questions to finish, but first I want to ask you about some of the wordal knockoffs

or wordal-inspired games out there because there are a million at this point. There's factual, there's hurdle, there's octortle, there's WorldDol, which is World Countries. And my personal favorite is Jeff Goldblum. I don't know if you've seen that one, but basically 90% of the time, the answer is Jelf Goldblum, but another 10% of time, it's just a different 13-letter word. Anyway, what is your policy around these? Do these circulate in, you know, the games division, or do you mostly ignore them?

How do you approach these word-old knock-offs? Yeah, we look at everything. So we're always looking at those, playing those, playing, you know, puzzles that come out from either competitors or just, you know, developers. And I love seeing all that. Because at the end of the day, it keeps wordle in the conversation is what we find. And it's hard to talk about those games without eventually or pretty quickly coming back to like, oh, and it was inspired by a wordle. Oh, what's that?

And so it just keeps us in the conversation. And we're very confident that we've got the original official wordle and that ultimately people will find us. You know, look if someone's trying to deliberately trade on our trademarks or copyrights or things like that and deceive, you know, people into thinking that. that they're the official Whirl and whatnot, that's a different, you know, matter. But if you're inspired by Wordle and are doing spinoffs and things like that, I think it ultimately accrues back to us. And, you know, look, maybe one of those will be something we want to pick up one day. So we're always watching the community.

All right. Next question. What is your personal Wordal starting word? My starting word is Stair, S-T-A-R-E. And I always had that one. And then a couple of years ago, it was the solution. And I got it in one. And it was so thrilling.

And despite what you might think, I don't actually know what the wordle's going to be every day. So I just play it like everyone else. And I was so happy. But then I thought, now that it's been, you know, I don't want to use it anymore because it's never going to be the one. I think people secretly hope they're going to get portal in one, right? So I pivoted. And I went on a kind of a long walk in the woods after that, changing every few weeks and couldn't quite find one. And then, I don't know if you saw, but we decided to start rerunning some words at the top of this year.

So Tracy now has been, you know, sort of opened up to like previously run words can be now, you know, part of the solution pool. So I went back to Stair, hoping that I'll get it again one day. See, I'll never get wordal in one because my first word is sore, but it's spelled S-O-A-R-E, which is just not really a word that people use. And then I followed up with Clint, which again, you would not think is a word because I'm vowel-vassing. You're optimizing, which I know some people don't think that's the way to play. but I'm glad that you're using a real word that has a chance of being the world all in one, because you're right. I think that's the more ethical way to play. And this is correct. The New York Times says that Adieu is the most popular starting word,

A-D-I-E-U. If you're looking for any inspiration. Bow-Maxing. That's correct. It's the most popular, but it is not the most effective. Oh. Toby says. Soaring Clint, I'm telling you. I watched a YouTube video like four years ago on this. Maybe it's changed since. I have a question. Why are New York? Times games so popular in Australia? You might have to ask the Australians. It is true that it's popular.

I think we're very popular in large English-speaking countries generally. So we're popular in Canada, the UK, Australia. But, yeah, I was at a conference in Southeast Asia, and some Australians were there, and they were going nuts for it. So, yeah, you might have to ask them. Maybe I'll just, they're doing it before us, so. That is true. They're not probably actually.

It comes out, you know, East. certain time, so they have to wait a little bit. But I would ask them. But yeah, in the list of most popular cities for New York Times games, it's, you know, kind of the major U.S. cities. And then it's like Sydney and Melbourne out of nowhere. Can I pitch you one game as my chance to make it into the New York Times? I wrote down like 10 of these.

I'm trying to figure out which one is my – the first one I wrote down was Burdell, which is just for burgers and it's a new bird call every day. But that doesn't seem like a big enough total addressable market. I like this, six degrees of cooking. It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Basically, you have one New York Times recipe, and you have to connect it to another one using only shared ingredients.

So you would start at like cacho ypepe, and you have to finish at Beef Wellington, and you have to look at the ingredients list and click on each ingredient to make it to the shared connection. It's interesting. You'd have to eliminate salt and pepper. Like there's a lot of... There's a lot of ingredients that all...

are the same across so many recipes. I haven't figured out the mechanics yet. I do like that. You should have workshopped with me first, but the concept is good. And why wouldn't you just call that six degrees of crispy bacon, though? Oh, you've got to work on the title. See, this is why you're the editor and I'm myself.

So, okay, we'll talk after this, but I think it's coming to a games app near you. All right, Jonathan, thanks so much. That is all the time we have. We appreciate you coming on. We learn so much about games and games. and game mechanics and what Toby thinks about in his first wordle

and six degrees of crispy bacon. Really appreciate it. Wish you all the continued success were huge fans of your games. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I had so many bad ones written down. Yeah.

I like the shared loss. I think there could be something there. You're thinking about the corporate synergies too. Right, I know. It doesn't quite work, though. I think what you need to do is go ingredient, recipe, ingredient. Because you can't just go ingredient,

ingredient ingredient because how never get to a recipe right you'll never get to a recipe again it needs a little more thought but yeah the wicket it's it's based off the wikipedia game i don't know if you've ever played that junk it's no what's it called the wikipedia game i i used to be like competitive in this where you just click on hyperlinks to get from one page to the other and you have to trace it through the hyperlinks as quickly as possible it is so fun you should play it in your office is it called the wiki game yeah the wiki game the wiki game and they just give you yeah Silk Road to Astronomical Object and it's whoever can get it in the least amount of hyperlinks. Yeah.

And there's a new one every day? There's a new one every like 20 seconds, honestly. Oh, wow. It continually... There's an infinite amount of articles, I guess. Right. Yeah, we used to play this at lunchtime and the big controversy was, can you command F? Or do you have to just scroll?

Oh. Because the best page to get to was America because it's like one of the biggest ones and it hits all sorts of industries and everything. So you try to get to America as quickly as possible. then you branch off from there. It's fun. Licky game. Oh, yeah. This does look kind of addictive.

And it sort of tracks it. Right. There's a leaderboard on the side. Yeah. Oh, games. Nothing better. Yeah, I love that. Cool.

Are we good, Ray? Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siyaya and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't.

end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.