10. Anna Garcia is correct: Tiles is for Cocomelon babies
9. Letter Boxed is simultaneously too restrictive and too open-ended. Frustrating without being challenging! You finish it and you're like, Well, I could probably do better than that…but who cares?
8. Sudoku has been upstaged by Pips. It's a good and classic game, but it's slow and dry. It lacks pizzazz. I never even look at it anymore. There's a reason the app has banished these three to a lonely exile at the bottom of the screen.
7. I hate Connections. Emotionally, I want to put it at the absolute bottom of the list, although I know it doesn't deserve that. The format isn't the worst, although it's not great—the fact that the puzzle gets dramatically easier as you go is textbook bad game design—but the real crime here is how poorly constructed 90% of the actual puzzles are. Yeah, every now and then they do something genuinely clever, but do you really want to subject yourself to week after week of “FISH SPECIES MINUS FIRST LETTER” to get to the rare good stuff? No.
6. Strands is way too easy, but also fairly time-consuming. This is a bad combination. Adding achievements just made it worse, because you feel compelled to sit there and stare at it until you've got the theme, but then as soon as you do, the rest of the puzzle basically solves itself. Same poor design as Connections.
5. The Mini is also way too easy, but it's mercifully quick. We are now in the top half of the ranking: the realm of puzzles I actually do a daily basis. I don't think much of the Mini, but it literally takes 15 seconds, so why not? It sneaks into the winner's circle on a technicality.
4. Wordle hits the sweet spot the other baby games (Letter Boxed, Strands, the Mini) miss. It's pretty easy, and you can knock it out in under a minute most of the time, but once or a twice a year, it gets your ass. Knowing that you might fail makes it more interesting than all the too-easy ones, but also, when you fail, you're like, Dang, I fucked that up. You got me, Wordle! This is in contrast to when you fail at Connections and just screech inarticulately.
3. Pips is like Sudoku, but more varied, more colorful, usually much faster, and generally better. The easy ones are far too easy, but the medium ones are nice, sometimes taking a couple minutes to sort out, and although the hard ones are often duds, they are occasionally diabolical, and it's very satisfying to solve a truly tough one. Each really hard Pips puzzle feels like a unique challenge, too, whereas every hard Sudoku feels more or less the same.
2. Spelling Bee is a burden, but it's a burden worth shouldering. And at least it's just one burden per day and not a never-ending barrage of them (see note on Crossplay below). My dad, my sister, and one of my best friends do the Spelling Bee every day and we all must share our Genius status or be shamed. There are strict rules: no looking at hints of any kind until Genius, after which you may look at the in-app Hints page only to help you get to Queen Bee. Resorting to the Community hints is acceptable for satisfying one's curiosity but does not Truly Count. Any game that inspires this kind of fanatical behavior and sprouts house rules must be a good game, and indeed, the Spelling Bee is very satisfying and has the platonically correct difficulty curve (easy, easy, easy, hard, very hard, “I'm never going to finish this one,” “ahh, PITAPAT, thank God”). It takes way, way too long a lot of the time, but in the end, that just makes success sweeter.
1. The Crossword is, of course, the GOAT. If I could get my friends and family to give up all the other games and just do the Crossword, I would be happy, and my days would be a little longer. And also I would be the undisputed champ forever, which is probably why nobody wants to do this. I recently solved a Sunday puzzle in under 10 minutes, and I've almost gotten my average Sunday time under 20, so it's not even taking an undue amount of time out of my day—just over 75 minutes a week, on average. A puzzle that rewards an enormous vocabulary, a pathological command of obscure trivia, a love of puns, and a willingness to spend years absorbing its own idiosyncratic language and patterns? And it has the right difficulty curve not only on a daily, per-puzzle basis, but on a kind of fractal weekly basis too? It's perfect.
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One must also consider Crossplay, which does not live in the Games app but is in fact a proper game, whereas everything in the Games app, counterintuitively, is really a puzzle. Crossplay is both a temptress and a burden. In game design terms, it's quite good. It makes a bunch of little tweaks to the Scrabble formula (Scrabble being an obsessive family favorite of ancient vintage, going back to my paternal grandmother), a couple of which are questionable (too many S's now) but which are generally very well thought out. Tile values are much improved, tile distribution is somewhat improved, the board is a bit more interesting, and most importantly, the endgame is transformed, and entirely for the better. It's fast and decisive, and there's a nice element of gamesmanship about pushing toward an empty bag or holding back. However, unlike all the proper NYT Games app games, Crossplay has no end. My friends and family start two games at once with me. I'm in there for an hour every day now. This cannot stand.
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