I think that it’s safe to say that a majority of us have played at least one of the various games on the New York Times website.
Whether it be the daily Wordle, the game where you have six chances to guess a specific word, or Connections, where you must correctly categorize a set of 16 words, or the game that is this very article’s subject, the newest addition to the NYT games catalog, Pips.
Pips is a domino-style puzzle game added in mid August. You are given a set of dominos and are tasked with positioning them in order to fill a specific space with a certain number of dots.
I, for one, have found this new game endearing and a breath of fresh air for the puzzle genre.
However, this new game hasn’t come without some controversy. Don’t get me wrong, the game is fine, but there has been some assumed correlation with the new game’s arrival and the disappearance of a more famous NYT game, the Mini crossword.
You see, the normal NYT crossword is locked behind a subscription paywall, meaning that you have to pay to play. But the Mini crossword was like a free sample of a larger product, enticing and persuading you to subscribe in order to play the real thing.
However, in late August, users got to play the final free version of the Mini crossword. The next day, they were shocked to find it behind the subscription paywall just like its larger counterpart.
You could argue that the entire purpose of the NYT game collection is to be a marketing device to drive up subscriptions, and that the company has a right to monetize whatever they’d like to. And while that may be true, it isn’t without some disruption online.
There have been accounts of users yearning for the return of the free mini crossword, I even saw one stating that they had canceled their entire game subscription in “solidarity.”
Personally, I am also downtrodden at the removal of the Mini crossword from public access. But at the same time, I view this as an opportunity for more games to enter the catalog – games that have high potential to become just as fun and as popular as their older counterparts.
The Mini crossword has been a part of the NYT’s game collection for just over 11 years, and it is sad to see it get put behind a paywall. But even if the fan favorite is gone, there are still plenty of more games for people to play while procrastinating. Pips is proof of that, and maybe, one day, it’ll be as big as the other acclaimed games.
