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Comment by unholiness | Hacker News Reader

FWIW the results of this process are... awful.

The 3 great games they have were not built this way. Crosswords obviously are decades old. Spelling Bee was entirely designed by Will Shortz (who mostly copied it from another paper). And Wordle was bought.

Every other game they've made I find almost indescribably unappealing. I love puzzles of all types, but it's hard to even call them puzzles. They are clunky interfaces on top of clunkier concepts which are more exercises in rule-following than puzzles to solve.

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I guess it seems kinda obvious that a news organisation is bad at moonlighting as a game studio? They presumably have some metrics that somebody looks at, but I highly doubt they are as closely drawn to profitability as say an indie studio.

> “It’s fairly democratic,” Zoe Bell, the executive producer of New York Times Games, said in an interview. Anyone on the Games team can pitch an idea. It’s a departure from the process at Ms. Bell’s past jobs, where only the game designers were allowed to contribute ideas.

I guess that's the case for big game studios that have established pipelines of new games, but NYT is basically an indie studio with marketing handled by their parent company, and indie studios from what I've seen are very much unstructured and does not have a well established pipeline for launching new games.

In the game industry, even most of the dinosaurs now recognize that only allowing designers to contribute ideas isn't a good idea. Perhaps the companies she worked for were particularly awful.

I enjoy Digits a lot and enjoy playing Vertex if it’s in front of me, although it’s not one I will specifically go to the website for. And there just aren’t that many extremely popular puzzle games in the history of puzzle games.

Jigsaws, Crosswords, and most recently Sudoku would probably cover the entire universe of extremely popular puzzle games.

Calling the results of the process “awful” is an incredible stretch to put it politely.

I play Letterbox and Vertex daily. Also enjoying Digits a lot.

Kind of odd that we have different tastes.

Different people having different tastes is not odd at all!

What about different people finding different things odd?

For a while there I was two-solving Letterboxed on an almost daily basis, but it regularly took 20-30 minutes to do. I couldn't bear to three-solve it knowing a two-word solution existed, so I hut a stretch where I started not finishing and just looking up the solution the next day. For many of these, the two-word solutions required words that were so far on the fringes of my vocabulary that I knew I would have never gotten them. Now I only spend about 5-10 minutes on it and if I don't think I'm onto anything by then, I move on with my day.

I studied and played Scrabble at a pretty high level. And unlike Spelling Bee, Letterbox accepts all the weird Scrabble words which makes it a lot easier for me. I’ll usually look at it for 10-15 minutes a day and if I can’t get a 2-word solve I just give up and move on to other things.

I think there’s even been 2 days with a 1-word solve!

And they recently removed cryptic and acrostic crosswords due to "complex nature of these puzzles".

In what way did they remove cryptic crosswords?

https://twitter.com/NYTGames/status/1620791597788008457

On March 1st, they removed the digital versions of the acrostic and cryptic puzzles. They've taken down the entire archive, including something like 150 cryptic puzzles and 450 or so acrostic puzzles. They also no longer publish either type at all digital, though they still are in print.

Wow! That's telling. I play 3 of their games every day and it's those 3 haha (not the full size crossword which you have to pay $, but the mini which is free)

Ain't nobody got time fo the others!

I play those three too. Sometimes I attempt Letterboxed. I stopped Sudoku because it's such a time sink, even if solvable. Gone are the days where one could sit with a paper for hours (real or otherwise), to solve puzzles.

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