Tech Advisor
My phone usage has undergone something of a transformation in recent weeks. After years of mindless scrolling, my desire for a more intentional relationship with my smartphone has finally become a reality. It’s been a long time coming. Over the last couple of years, I’ve experimented with flip phones and dumb phones as potential screen-time solutions, but nothing has stuck. Don’t bother with the latter – T9 texting is a modern-day disaster that should be consigned to the dustbin of history. But trying to avoid using my phone during every moment of downtime is about as effective as watching the news to cure insomnia (hint: not very). Instead, I wanted to find alternatives that a) had a clear start and end (no more endless scrolling!), b) felt like I was using my brain cells rather than frying them, and c) that I was actually excited to use every day. The game I settled on, which has since dominated my screen time, satisfies all three. And you’ve probably heard of it. A slice of New York in my pocket No, not pizza, though that could be equally satisfying. I’m talking about The New York Times’ Games app, or ‘NYT Games’ as I’ll refer to it from here on out. Whatever you think of The New York Times’ news and reporting, its games app is totally separate. There are loads of games to choose from, but three I focus on every day: Pips, Connections and, of course, Wordle. You’re probably familiar with the last of these from its time in the zeitgeist in 2022. You have six guesses to find a random five-letter word, with matching letters highlighted. 4 out of 5 vowels in one guess? You can’t beat it Foundry Pips is a domino strategy game, where all the tiles must fit into a board (or two) and satisfy the criterion for each section, whether it’s all the numbers being equal, a specific number or greater or less than a number. There are three levels of difficulty, and I’m proud to say that I’ve conquered the hard ones a couple of times recently. Connections is the one I struggle with the most. A board of 16 seemingly unrelated words or phrases must be grouped into four groups of four, with only three mistakes allowed. British quiz fans will recognise this as the Connecting Wall from the BBC’s Only Connect, something host Victoria Coren Mitchell was keen to point out when it launched. But watching an episode is a bit beyond me at 9:00 AM (or any time – let’s be honest), so this is the next best thing. The Americanisms and cryptic wordplay mean I’m successful less than 30% of the time, but it’s still a bit of fun to start the day. Look familiar, Only Connect fans? Foundry Limits in all the right places I regularly spend over 40 minutes playing NYT Games, making it the biggest chunk of my much-reduced screen time by far. But I’m okay with that – unlike social media, it feels like a genuinely productive use of my time. Two further aspects of the app make it especially appealing. The first is the element of competition. Every day, all users of the app worldwide get the exact same puzzles to solve. By adding friends and family to your daily leaderboards, you can directly compete, regardless of when in the day works for you. Getting the Wordle in fewer guesses than my mum gives me just the right hit of dopamine in the morning. Like so many mobile games, NYT Games is a freemium app. But instead of the common experience of incredibly hamstrung free functionality, you can still play many of the daily games – including my three favourites – without paying. Getting the Wordle in fewer guesses than my mum gives me just the right hit of dopamine For some people, this would be a frustrating limitation. For me, it provides the perfect balance. It means I can open the app each day, play my puzzles and then run out of things to do. When a free trial of the Premium tier made hundreds of thousands of games available, the choice felt totally overwhelming. Even the hard version of Pips is included in the free tier Foundry Unlike social media and all the other apps I became obsessed with over the years, the free tier of NYT Games has an endpoint built in. It’s an effective stopping cue which forces me to make a decision: either start using a different app (the web browser is the only one that can still hook me these days) or move on to another activity. I’m proud to say that I’ve been choosing the latter more often than not. I’m hesitant to call my previous habits an addiction, even though they did match many of the symptoms of gambling or substance abuse. But it was certainly very problematic usage, leaving me feeling unsatisfied and cynical about the world around me. By deprioritising my phone in my life, I’m able to intentionally use it for activities that add genuine value to my life. And NYT Games is undoubtedly one of them. I’m not saying it’ll work for you, but I bet there’s an app that fits better into your morning routine than another doomscroll of Instagram. Trust me, I’ve been there. I’ve been playing NYT Games on the Pixel 10 Pro XL and Galaxy Z Fold 7 , but these are just two of the many brilliant phones you can buy right now . Just make sure you use your new phone wisely.
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