NYT Games is testing Zorse, a new ‘phrase guessing’ puzzle game

The New York Times is starting to beta test a new puzzle game called “Zorse,” as reported by Semafor. The game is a “new phrase guessing game where every puzzle is a mash-up of two phrases,” NYT spokesperson Jordan Cohen says in a statement to The Verge. As Semafor points out, the Zorse name “identifies the offspring of a zebra and another equine,” so it seems like the game will focus on wordplay like that.

Cohen says Zorse is currently only available in Canada, meaning I can’t play it myself. But my Canada-based colleague Andrew Webster gave it a shot and told me about it; the game sounds a bit like Wheel of Fortune with a puzzle-y twist.

When you start a Zorse puzzle, you’re given a clue and shown a series of blank tiles that, when revealed, spell out a phrase related to the clue. For today’s puzzle, the letter “H” was filled in for two spots already. From there, you can click on a title and have that letter revealed, and you can do that up to five times. At any point, when you think you know the phrase, you can enter it in.

It seems fun to me, but I’m the kind of person who already plays Wordle, Connections, Strands, and the NYT mini crossword every day. Hopefully, Zorse will be available more widely soon so I can try it out.

It’s not out of the ordinary for the NYT to beta test new games. Strands launched in beta earlier this year before officially becoming a part of the NYT Games app in June. Digits, a math-based puzzle game, wasn’t as lucky, launching in April 2023 in beta before being shut down a few months later.

In other NYT Games news, subscribers can now suffer through old Connections puzzles thanks to a new archive. LinkedIn has some game news as well: it has added a fourth title to its lineup called Tango.