Wordle has been a game-changer for The New York Times. Since its acquisition in 2022, the Times Game app has blown up, with 10 million downloads in 2023. The Games department at the newspaper has expanded from just over a dozen to more than 100 people over the last decade. Subscribers can now subscribe to just the Games section for $6/month (or less with introductory deals). According to the company, Wordle has been played over 4.8 billion times. Spelling Bee players have reached Genius level over 120 million times.
Now a new game is making its way to the NYT Games stable: Zorse, which is named after the hybrid animal crossed between a zebra and a horse. That should give you a sense of what the game is about. I call it a phrasal portmanteau game. You have to fill in a number of words to combine two phrases into one.
Players are given a number of blank words with just one letter filled in. There is also a clue at the top. You can then click on boxes to “reveal” new letters up to five times. This is very similar to Wheel Of Fortune. Once you’ve used all your reveals, you have to fill in the rest of the letters on your own and guess the phrase.
Here is a recent Zorse I played:
The clue here is “Christmas song with lots of extra features” and there’s just one “H” to go by. I revealed my letters, filled in the blanks and made my guess:
As you can see, the song “Carol of the Bells” is combined with the phrase “Bells and whistles” to form the answer, which I guessed correctly. It’s a fun little challenge, though I wonder if giving us five reveals is overkill, making it too easy to guess the final answer. Perhaps it should be dialed back to three. Then again, I’ve only played the game twice.
Currently, Zorse is only available in Canada (or via a VPN) but will hopefully make it to a wider beta and eventually onto the NYTs Games app, joining Wordle, Connections, Strands, the Crossword, Spelling Bee and all the other games in time.
“Similar to how The Times treats its other games when they’re in beta, we’re hoping to learn how players engage with Zorse and look forward to hearing their feedback,” the company said in a statement back in October when testing began.
