Crossplay vs Scrabble vs Words With Friends

Crossplay, the two-player word game The New York Times launched in the US on 21 January 2026, feels familiar at first: a 15×15 board, a tray of seven tiles (Crossplay's word for the rack) and words built crossword-style. Then the numbers start to feel off, because the premium squares, several letter values, the bag and the ending have all changed.

This guide covers what's different and how to adjust if you're coming from Scrabble or Words With Friends. If you want the differences between those two, see our Scrabble vs Words With Friends comparison.

The quick comparison

The square counts for Crossplay and Words With Friends come from third-party tallies of each board, as does Crossplay's centre-square entry. Crossplay's help page gives no rule for ending a game early on passes, so that cell shows only the empty-bag ending.

The board: more letter premiums, fewer double words

The four kinds of premium square are the same, but the mix favours letters over words: more than half again as many triple-letter squares as Scrabble, and fewer than half the double-word squares.

Your first word must cover the centre square, which doubles it in Scrabble. Third-party board maps show no multiplier on Crossplay's centre, and the star in Words With Friends carries none either.

Crossplay pushes its biggest multipliers toward the edges and corners, and Zoe Bell, an executive producer at NYT Games, has advised building outward to reach the triple-word squares. The payoff can be large: an eight-letter word can cover a double-word and a triple-word square in one play, multiplying the word by six.

How to play this board

• Aim heavy tiles at triple-letter squares. A J there is worth 30 on its own (24 in Scrabble), and a K or V 18. Our list of short words with J, Q, X and Z gives those tiles somewhere to land.
• Score both ways. A tile that forms words across and down collects its letter premium in each, so know your two-letter words and three-letter words cold. Pick Scrabble US on those pages: the default All words view mixes in Collins-only words such as CH and ZO, which aren't in Crossplay's list. Crossplay should also take a few newer words, such as OK and EW, that the Scrabble US list lacks.
• Treat double-word squares as scarce. With only eight, using or blocking an open one matters more than in Scrabble.
• Watch the long lanes. STRAINED is worth 9 at face value, or 54 at six times, before letter premiums or a sweep bonus. Check what a lane toward the edge offers your opponent before you open it.

Letter values: what to relearn

Twelve letters score the same in all three games: A, D, E, F, I, O, Q, R, S, T, X and Z. Blanks are worth nothing in each. These fourteen score differently from Scrabble, Words With Friends or both:

Coming from Scrabble, B, K, L, U and W gain a point, G, J and V gain two, and H loses one. Coming from Words With Friends, G, K, V, W and Y gain a point, while C, M, N and P lose one.

Say your tray holds E, G, H, L, O, S and V. At face value, Scrabble scores SHOVEL above GLOVES, 12 to 10. In Crossplay GLOVES wins 15 to 14, and even GLOVE ties SHOVEL. The board has the final say, but reaching for the H word out of habit now costs points.

The bag: three blanks and five S's

Crossplay's 100 tiles are 97 letters and 3 blanks. Compared with a Scrabble set, it adds an S (for five in all), an H and a blank, and drops an I, an N and a U.

• More flexible tiles. Blanks and S's do the most for sweeps and hooks, and there are more of both, but don't spend one for a few points.
• Fewer U's for the Q. With three instead of four, you'll hold a Q without a U more often. Our Q-without-U guide lists the words that don't need one, and Crossplay should also accept QAPIK, a 2018 addition missing from the older list that guide uses.
• A cheaper H. There are three instead of two, each worth a point less than in Scrabble.

The 40-point sweep

Crossplay's version of the bingo is the sweep, worth 40 points on top of the word's score: ten less than Scrabble pays and five more than Words With Friends. Rohit Crasta, the game's lead designer, told Stefan Fatsis, a tournament player and the author of Word Freak, that he cut it because he thinks Scrabble leans too hard on bingos and a smaller reward evens things out between players.

Scrabble players should fish less (play off one or two tiles in the hope of drawing into a sweep). Rack balance still matters, but if a heavy tile can hit a triple-letter square now, take the points. Words With Friends players get the opposite nudge, since a sweep pays five more than they're used to.

The endgame: one last turn each

Crossplay winds down differently. According to the Times' help page, once nothing is left to draw you each get one more turn, and then the scores stand. Tiles still on your tray cost nothing. Emptying your tray first doesn't end the game or earn a going-out bonus (a seven-tile play still collects the 40-point sweep), and your opponent still takes their last turn.

Scrabble ends when a player goes out with the bag empty, or after six scoreless turns in a row. Words With Friends works the same way, except that three scoreless moves in a row end it, unless the score is 0-0. In both, the player who went out gains the value of the opponent's leftover tiles, which the opponent loses.

Adjusting your endgame

• Stop dumping tiles. In Scrabble and Words With Friends, a stranded Q or Z costs you twice. In Crossplay it just scores nothing, so save it for a square where it pays.
• Play your last turn for points. Going out first earns nothing.
• Check the turn order before you plan around it. Accounts differ on how those last turns fall. Fatsis writes that whoever empties the bag makes the final play, while other guides and player reports describe the app keeping turn counts equal, which would give the last move to whoever went second. Play out an ending against the computer and see for yourself before you build your last two moves around either version.
• Read their tray. With the bag empty, every tile you can't see is theirs. If you move first, consider taking the spot their best play needs.

The word list: NWL2023, checked as you play

Crossplay checks words against NWL2023, the NASPA Word List, which the Times licenses from NASPA Games. Its help page lists two kinds of entry that are left out: trademarks and proper nouns.

NWL2023 itself has 196,601 words; Crossplay's version is slightly smaller once trademarks are taken out, and the Times hasn't published a count. Some helper sites say the Times trims the list further, but the help page mentions no other cuts.

• North American tournament players, and anyone on Scrabble GO in US English, already use NWL2023.
• Collins players, used to the bigger list played in most other countries, will see some favourites refused.
• Words With Friends players are changing dictionaries. Zynga's grew from ENABLE in its own direction, adding more than 25,000 words in October 2026, so a word that works in one app may fail in the other.

NWL2023 contains every word in the 2022 edition of the Scrabble players' dictionary, including words first added in 2018, so Crossplay should accept newer words such as OK, EW, EMOJI, BAE and HYGGE. None of the lists behind our word checker and finders has them yet. Those tools use TWL06 (shown as Scrabble US), an older Collins edition and ENABLE, so a word they reject may still be playable.

The gap runs the other way too. NASPA removed 259 slurs from its list in 2020, and TWL06 is older than that change, so our tools can still show words Crossplay won't take. Our dictionary comparison explains how the lists overlap.

No challenges, no bluffing

Over the board, Scrabble lets you play any word and dare your opponent to challenge it. An invalid word comes off the board, while a failed challenge costs the challenger a turn in North American play. Crossplay checks each word while you're still placing tiles: a word on its list gets a yellow outline, and nothing else can be submitted, as in Words With Friends. Bluffing is gone, but so is the risk: if you're unsure of a word, lay it down and look for the outline.

App features that change how you play

Crossplay lives in its own free app for iOS and Android, separate from the NYT Games app, and at the time of writing you can't play it in a browser. You need a free NYT account to play at all, even against the computer, but no subscription.

Cross Bot, the post-game coach

At launch, Cross Bot reviewed finished games against people that ran at least five turns, and an April 2026 update added games against the computer. A review scores your strategy and your luck, each from 1 to 99, picks out a handful of key turns and suggests better moves, judged on strategy as well as points and looking two turns ahead. It also graphs who had control of the game as it went.

Cross Bot comes with any subscription that includes NYT Games, such as Games, All Access or home delivery. Other registered players get limited access.

After a loss, go to the flagged turns and name what you missed: a heavy tile on a triple-letter square, an edge lane, a sweep. Then enter that tray in our Crossplay word finder to see what else it could make.

The rest of the toolkit

• Remaining tiles: a built-in view of the tiles left makes tracking easy. Check it before spending a blank or an S.
• Bots: easy, medium and hard. Treat the hard one as practice: Fatsis reported in April that he had won all of his 30-plus games against it, by about 150 points on average.
• Clock: you get seven days per move, and letting it run out forfeits the game. At launch, the Times said you could run up to 30 games at once.

Making the switch

From Scrabble: keep your parallel plays, rack balance and, if you play on the North American list, your vocabulary. Drop three reflexes: leaning on double-word squares, chasing bingos at any cost and dumping tiles late.

From Words With Friends: keep your eye for heavy tiles on letter premiums, relearn the dictionary starting with the two-letter Scrabble words, and expect C, M, N and P to score a point less and G, K, V, W and Y a point more.

The core skills carry over. What moves is where the points are: on triple-letter squares, out toward the edges and in a last turn played purely for points.

WordFinderZ is independent of The New York Times and of every other game publisher mentioned here.