Most people who play daily puzzles start with the New York Times. Wordle, Connections, Strands and the crosswords are the shared vocabulary of the genre, and a lot of PerDiem's 23 free games are in conversation with them. Some are close cousins. Others have nothing like them in the NYT lineup.
PerDiem Games isn't affiliated with The New York Times. The NYT details here come from the Times' own game pages and Wikipedia as of October 2026, and subscription terms change, so check their site before you rely on them.
Four games with an NYT cousin
Association and Connections. Sixteen words, four hidden groups of four, four mistakes, and a nudge when you're "One away". If you play Connections, you can start Association without reading the rules. Ours is meant to lean toward plainer links than the trickiest Connections boards. The Association guide covers the decoy words that sit in two groups at once.
Throughline and Strands. Both are themed word searches where you drag through touching letters, diagonals included, and every letter belongs to a theme word. Throughline's board is 6 by 8, and one key word runs from one side to the other. Spell a real word that isn't in the theme and it charges your hint, which Strands players will recognize.
Mini and the Mini Crossword. Both are 5 by 5 crosswords. The difference is access: Wikipedia lists the NYT Mini as subscriber-only since late August 2025, and ours is free with no account.
Midi and the NYT's Midi crossword. The Times added a mid-sized crossword in February 2026. Ours runs from 9 by 9 on Monday to 11 by 11 on Friday and Saturday. If you finish the Mini before your coffee cools and want ten more minutes, either one fits.
There's one more near-match. The NYT's Pips has you place dominoes to meet conditions on the board. Cliques also uses dominoes, but you're growing groups of matching shapes and colors on a 5 by 7 board, and every group scores again each time it grows. Same piece, different puzzle.
Four games the NYT doesn't have
These are the ones we'd point you to first if you've already worked through the Times.
Packline. You gerrymander a map. Orange and purple dots are voters, you drop block shapes on them to make eight districts, and the bar at the top says how many each color has to win. The surprise is that the side with fewer voters can win more districts. It's a spatial puzzle with a real idea in it. See how to play Packline.
Hearsay. Everyone on the grid is honest or a liar, and each person makes one statement about the others. One person is revealed at the start, and a rule at the top of the screen is always true. Every case can be solved by reasoning alone, so there's no guessing. The Monday walkthrough solves a whole board one certain mark at a time.
Scope. A control panel with no labels, and a wave to match. Each day is a new machine, so a knob that changed the height yesterday might change the number of waves today. You find out what each control does by turning it. How to play Scope.
Ticker. Ninety seconds, one fictional company, headlines flashing past, and you decide whether to buy, sell or short. It's play money and made-up companies, so it's a game and not advice. How to play Ticker.
Two more worth a look: Exhibit, a jigsaw that zooms out through four rounds until a real painting from the Art Institute of Chicago's public-domain collection is on the wall, and Switchboard, where you join pairs of shapes along tracks without letting any lines cross.
Where the NYT is ahead
The Daily Crossword has run since 1942, and we aren't going to out-crossword that. Wordle's place in everyone's morning is also something a small site can't copy. What we can offer is a different spread of puzzle types, with no paywall and no account.
If you want a gentler on-ramp than this post, Games like NYT Games pairs each NYT habit with a PerDiem game.