I do Wordle, Pips, Strands, Connections & Sudoku. Of all of them, I find Connections definitely the hardest, even without the occasional US cultural references that I miss.
There is a theory that for a puzzle game to interesting it has to be NP-hard. Something about how otherwise your brain is too good a latching onto the "trick" and the game is boring.
Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, and Pips (All modes) for me. Wordle is fun but Pips is very satisfying. Pips medium can sometimes be more difficult than hard one.
I do wordle, strands and, when available (once a week) I do the midi.
Wordle and strands together usually take less than 5m. The midi ranges from 3m30 (my best time) to ~12m (my worst).
Not done Letterbox, Pips and Tiles, but I figured that all their puzzles are at the same level of difficulty.
It's interesting, to me, that (from my reading of the paper, which was very quick) they they consider it hard/easy based on a sort of brute-force attempt to find all the answers.
If you enjoy the NYT games but want something new too, check out The Daily Baffle at https://dailybaffle.com. There's a range of word and logic puzzles that NYT lovers should appreciate.
For clarification, these results mean the problems are difficult when some aspect of the problem size grows (e.g. dictionary size, alphabet size, ...). For example for letter boxed, the size of the square can vary, so can the alphabet size and dictionary of words. See Table 1.
It is not really meaningful to talk about the computational complexity of most problems exactly as they are published in NYT, or they end up trivially in P, since the problem description length is bounded by finite English letters, fixed board size, finite English dictionary etc.
They are difficult. As I'm not a native English speaker, I didn't know many of the obscure words or usages, so I actually played these games from a purely computational perspective. I discovered early on that there were a lot of at least NPC problems in them. As my English improved (partially thanks to these games), intuitions began to help me take shortcuts, as if I had become a nondeterministic Turing machine.
I do World, Strands, Connections, and occasionally pips and the spelling bee. I used to be a big fan of the minis but you have to be logged in to do them now :(
I'm honestly a bit surprised that strands has managed to stick around as long as it has in the current form. The way "hints" work especially mystifies me; I don't really get why someone would want an entire word given to them more than maybe once total just from being able to guess completely unrelated words that are in the puzzle.
New York Times games are hard: A computational perspective
(arxiv.org)73 points by PaulHoule 23 January 2026 | 33 comments
Comments
Wordle and strands together usually take less than 5m. The midi ranges from 3m30 (my best time) to ~12m (my worst).
Not done Letterbox, Pips and Tiles, but I figured that all their puzzles are at the same level of difficulty.
It's interesting, to me, that (from my reading of the paper, which was very quick) they they consider it hard/easy based on a sort of brute-force attempt to find all the answers.
It is not really meaningful to talk about the computational complexity of most problems exactly as they are published in NYT, or they end up trivially in P, since the problem description length is bounded by finite English letters, fixed board size, finite English dictionary etc.
If you like puzzles this will brighten your day.
https://youtu.be/yKf9aUIxdb4
Statistically, approximately zero people play Letter Boxed and Tiles.