The New York Times’ games team is trying something new: it’s about to start testing a Scrabble-like game it calls Crossplay, but instead of folding the game into the main NYT Games app, Crossplay will be a standalone app. “We’re very specifically wanting to reach all new audiences with this game,” particularly people that love to compete and love word games, he says. Crossplay requires a free NYT account to play, and your friends from the main NYT Games app will carry over, Knight says. Wordle was played 5.3 billion times, “3.3 billion successful Connections were made,” and Strands, the NYT’s word search game, was played 1.3 billion times. The NYT games team is still developing new puzzles for the main games app, such as Pips, a logic game, that it started beta testing in Canada in April.