With ‘Strands,’ the New York Times has found its next hit game

Following the success of Connections and Wordle, the pressure was on for the New York Times to find its next hit game. It didn’t have to look far.

Following the success of Connections and Wordle, the pressure was on for the New York Times to find its next hit game. It didn’t have to look far. Strands, a word search game, is officially joining the newspaper’s portfolio of games Friday following a four-month testing phase in which it garnered millions of players despite being practically hidden. The puzzle marks the latest in a string of successes for Times’ Games section, which has helped grow the paper’s subscription business and bolster its bottom line in an era of declining advertising revenue. During the testing phase, Strands was only playable on the web or via links from its other games. Now that it’s exiting beta testing, it will soon be added to the Times’ Games app, exposing it to millions of new players and joining the app’s collection of ten games, which also includes the Crossword, Spelling Bee and Soduku. “Strands got very big, very quickly. It was a little bigger than we were ready for in the first few days,” admitted Jonathan Knight, head of Games at the Times. That’s partly because of the sustaining popularity of Connections, which was the second-biggest referrer to Strands behind people searching for it, and still has millions of players. “We’re seeing the new games build on each other, so that’s really exciting as our audience has grown pretty significantly over the past couple of few years,” he told CNN. Strands, like Connections, was recently hatched at a “Game Jam” (think: a hackathon, but for games) and filled the need for a word search-type of game in the app. It “bubbled up as a version of a word search that was true to the New York Times’ games,” Knight said.