New York Times Crossword & Game Answers

Your One-Stop Page for New York Times Games Answers

Stuck on something from the Times? This is the Daze Puzzle hub worth bookmarking.

We’ve gathered the entire NYT lineup in a single place: all three of the Times’ crosswords plus its expanding roster of daily word games. Every one gets a daily answer along with a hint, so you can take a nudge instead of going straight to the full solution. Whatever NYT game you’re playing, the answer should be here the same day the puzzle comes out.

NYT Crossword Answers: The Mini, the Midi & the Daily Crossword

The Times publishes three distinct crosswords, and each one is designed for a different moment in your day.

NYT Mini Crossword

The Mini is the fast one: a 5×5 grid you can knock out in a couple of minutes. It typically appears the evening before its listed date, and our answer page follows soon after.

A bit of history: the Mini is what launched the Times’ entire digital games expansion back in 2014, and Joel Fagliano has run it ever since. It’s part of the subscription program too. The grid is 5×5 most days but grows to 7×7 on Saturdays, and like its big sibling, it gradually gets harder as the week progresses.

NYT Midi Crossword

The Midi occupies the middle ground. It’s larger and somewhat harder than the Mini without approaching the full puzzle, made for days when you want more of a challenge but still a quick one.

It’s the youngest of the three, created to fill a gap: the Mini felt too light, the full Crossword too heavy. Ian Livengood is the editor. You’ll usually get a 9×9 grid, though it can grow to 10×10 or even 11×11 as the week goes on.

A nice detail: each Midi carries a title that nods at the day’s theme, a feature normally saved for the big Sunday puzzle. And since it’s designed to hold steady at Monday-level difficulty every day, it never ramps up the way the Mini and the full Crossword do.

NYT Crossword

And then there’s The Crossword, the flagship daily that climbs from a gentle Monday to a brutal Saturday, with a bigger Sunday grid on top. It releases at 10pm Eastern the evening before (the Sunday puzzle comes out at 6pm Eastern on Saturdays).

This is where it all started. The puzzle has run continuously since February 15, 1942, making it one of the paper’s longest-running features. In all those decades, just four people have served as editor, and the current one, Will Shortz, has held the job since 1993. Weekday grids are the standard 15×15. Sunday expands to 21×21, but in difficulty it usually plays closer to a Wednesday or Thursday than a punishing Saturday.

Each puzzle has its own dedicated answers page here, so if you already know which one brought you, you can go directly to today’s Mini answers, today’s Midi answers, or today’s Crossword answers rather than digging through a general page.

NYT Games: Connections, Spelling Bee & More

Outside the crosswords, the Times has assembled a strong slate of daily word games, and we cover the lot.

Connections

Connections gives you sixteen words to sort into four hidden groups, and of all the games it’s usually the hardest to reason through without a little help.

Wyna Liu is the creator, and the game began as a quiet beta on June 12, 2023 before becoming one of the Times’ biggest successes. The four groups are color-coded by difficulty (yellow is the easy one, purple is the streak-killer) and four wrong guesses ends the game. It’s now reportedly the second most-played title in the whole NYT Games app.

Spelling Bee

In Spelling Bee, you build as many words as you can out of seven letters, with one required letter in every word.

The game (created by Frank Longo) has more history than you’d guess. Will Shortz first devised the concept in 2014 as a weekly print-only feature, and it didn’t become the daily digital game everyone knows until 2018. Sam Ezersky edits it today. The rules have stayed essentially the same: words must be at least four letters, must include the center letter, and letters can repeat as often as you like.

Rack up enough points and you’ll rise through ranks like “Solid” and “Amazing” on the way to “Genius.” There’s always at least one pangram in the grid, and finding it earns a hefty seven-point bonus.

Pips

Pips is the newer domino-based puzzle, where you place numbered tiles on a board to hit set targets.

It’s the newest arrival, launched only on August 18, 2025, also under Ian Livengood. There are no clues here. Instead you drag dominoes onto a board divided into colored zones, and every zone has its own condition to meet: the pips might need to sum to an exact number, or all match each other, or avoid matching entirely.

Three difficulty levels release daily, and on Hard you can find yourself managing well over a dozen dominoes at once.

Sudoku

Sudoku belongs to the same daily NYT lineup, and lots of visitors come to Daze Puzzle for it. NYT Games publishes three separate grids each day: Easy, Medium, and Hard. All three refresh every 24 hours, just like the crossword. Since there are no clues to decode, what solvers really want isn’t “the answer” in the crossword sense but the completed grid at their difficulty, plus a quick note on the technique that cracks whatever spot has them stuck.

Sudoku has quietly been part of the NYT lineup since 2014, the same year as the Mini. It’s the classic format you already know: a 9×9 grid divided into nine 3×3 boxes, with no digit repeating in any row, column, or box.

NYT Puzzles FAQ

What time does the NYT Mini answer update? 

The Mini usually goes live around 10pm Eastern the night before its date, and our answer page updates shortly afterward.

What’s the difference between the Mini and the Midi? 

The Mini is a small 5×5 grid built to take a couple of minutes. The Midi is noticeably larger and somewhat tougher.

Where can I find yesterday’s NYT puzzle answer? 

Every puzzle we cover, whether crossword or word game, has its own answer archive, so previous days remain available after the current page moves on.

Is using a hint the same as cheating? 

Not really. A hint points you in the right direction without giving the answer away, so you can usually still complete the puzzle on your own. That’s exactly why every word game page here keeps hints separate from full answers.