How to Play NYT Crossplay

Everything you need to go from first game to confident player: the rules, the scoring system, the board layout, and the details that differ from Scrabble. After you know the rules, the free Crossplay board solver ranks legal plays on your actual 15×15 board.

What is Crossplay?

Crossplay is The New York Times' first two-player word game, launched January 21, 2026. Two players build words on a shared 15×15 board — like a faster, mobile-first cousin of Scrabble with its own letter values, its own board layout, and a curated dictionary. You can battle friends, get matched against strangers in real time, or play the daily game (added July 5, 2026). After each match, the built-in "Cross Bot" coach reviews your plays.

The basics of a turn

You hold a rack of 7 tiles drawn from a 100-tile bag (3 of them are blanks).
On your turn, place tiles in a single row or column to form a word. Every new word must connect to tiles already on the board (the first word must cover the center star).
All cross-words your tiles form must also be valid words.
Your score = the sum of tile values in every word you made or extended, with bonus squares applied to newly placed tiles only.

Scoring: tile values

Crossplay's letter values are not Scrabble's. The quick version: A E I N O R S T = 1, D L U = 2, C H M P = 3, B F G Y = 4, W = 5, K V = 6, X = 8, J Q Z = 10, blanks = 0. See the full tile values chart with a Scrabble comparison.

Bonus squares

The board has double/triple letter squares (DL, TL) and double/triple word squares (DW, TW). Two layout details that surprise Scrabble players: the corners are triple-letter squares (not triple-word), and the center star is a double-word square — so the first play is worth double. The eight TW squares sit on the outer ring, three squares in from each corner.

The +40 bonus

Play all 7 tiles from your rack in one turn and you earn a flat +40 points on top of the word score. Chasing this bonus is the single biggest scoring lever in the game — our strategy guide covers how to set it up.

What dictionary does NYT Crossplay use?

Crossplay's word list is curated by the NYT from the NASPA Word List (NWL23) — the North American tournament dictionary used in competitive Scrabble — with light editing of their own. That is why obscure-looking words like QI or ZA behave differently from what a regular dictionary would suggest: NWL23 is a tournament word list, not a definition dictionary, and it includes plenty of short words that exist purely as legal plays.

Practical consequences:

Words that are valid in Scrabble are usually valid here — but not guaranteed, because the NYT edits the list.
British-only words from the international list (CSW/Collins) are generally not accepted, since NWL23 is the North American list.
The list is fixed inside a given season; new words don't appear mid-game the way a live dictionary would update.

Our board solver runs on a large public tournament-style word list (ENABLE-based, 168,551 words) as the closest freely available approximation of NWL23. It overlaps with the NYT list almost everywhere, so scoring and placements are exact — but on rare words the game may reject a suggestion, in which case the next result down will be legal. Short words are where the two lists agree most reliably, which is another reason the two-letter word list is the highest-value thing to memorize.

Checking your best move

Want to see what the best play on your board actually was? Our free board solver ranks every legal move by exact score — you can even import your board from a screenshot.

Crossplay Board Solver · Solve from a screenshot · Board layout · Tile values · Two-letter words · Three-letter words · Q words without U · J, Q, X, Z words · Vowel dumps · Strategy tips