This Apple News+ word game is better than Wordle, Connections, and Strands

Macworld

Back when News+ launched in 2019, the value was somewhat debatable. While the $9.99 service offered access to hundreds of magazines as well as “premium online publications,” it paled in comparison to the New York Times’ All-Access subscription’s array of content, including recipes, sports, podcasts, and, most importantly, games.

Over time, that began to change. iOS 16.5 added a dedicated Sports tab for scores, standings, and related coverage, and later that year, Apple began offering daily crossword and crossword mini puzzles with iOS 17, and introduced News+ Food with restaurant reviews and recipes earlier this year.

In late 2023, Apple hiked the price from $9.99 to $12.99 a year, but it’s still a better value than when it launched for 30 percent less. It’s a little Google News, a little Zinio, and a little ESPN all rolled into one. I’m an Apple One subscriber, but even if I dropped that, I’d still subscribe to Apple News+.

But the reason isn’t the news. It’s the games. Apple News+ includes five puzzles that subscribers can play each day: Crossword and Crossword Mini, Quartiles, Sudoku, and Emoji Game. The crosswords and sudoku games are self-explanatory, and Quartiles is a fun Boggle-esque word game that challenges you to create compound words from a set of 20 fragments.




Apple’s Emoji Game is a perfect mix of fun, challenging, and addicting.Apple

They’re all fun, but ever since Emoji Game arrived on July 17 to mark World Emoji Day, I’ve been hooked. It’s as addictive as Wordle, more challenging than Strands, and as clever as Connections.

The concept is simple. Each day, there are three short phrases with blanks corresponding to an emoji-based word. Each phrase has a clue that is only partially revealed, so the challenge is two-fold: figure out the phrase with only a part of a clue, and then figure out which emoji sequence fills in the missing letter. A perfect score is 6, and each wrong answer or clue reveal adds a point to the score.

Some emoji clues replace full words, others are parts of words or span two words. For example, Wednesday’s first puzzle showed “Intelligent birds…” under a 7-letter word broken down into one three-word and one four-word blank. Tapping the clue revealed “Intelligent birds in the crow family,” and the answers were MAG (an emoji of an open magazine) and PIES (two pie emojis).

It’s harder than it looks and requires a specific way of reasoning to figure out. Sometimes you need to figure out the phrase first, other times, recognizing one of the emoji clues will help make sense of a phrase. It’s fun, challenging, and clever, and only takes a couple of games to get completely hooked. It’s the first thing I do in the morning now, even before Wordle and Connections.

You’ll need to be an Apple News+ subscriber to play ($12.99 per month, free one-month trial), however, and it’s not so easy to find if you haven’t played before. To get to the games tab on an iPhone, launch the News app, then tap the search icon at the bottom right of the menu bar, and then navigate to Puzzles. There you’ll find the Emoji Game with today’s games spotlighted along with a full archive going back to July.

If you can’t stop playing, don’t say I didn’t warn you.