Crossplay Solver

What Crossplay is

Crossplay is the first head-to-head multiplayer game from New York Times Games. Two players share one board and take turns adding letter tiles, building words off each other and scoring for the value of the letters plus whatever the board's bonus squares multiply. It launched on 21 January 2026 as a standalone app for iOS and Android, separate from the main NYT Games app. It is free to play, but you need a New York Times account, and the account is what carries your games, stats and progress between devices.

The structure will feel familiar if you have played a tile game before. Each player starts with seven tiles in a tray, hidden from the opponent. After you play, your tray refills to seven until the bag cannot cover it. You may also swap tiles or pass, and either of those uses your turn. The board is 15 squares by 15, which the team that built it describes as 225 individual cells. The opening word has to cover the center square, and from then on every new word has to touch something already on the board.

Three rules separate Crossplay from the game it most resembles. First, tile values are not the standard set: the letters are rebalanced, which changes which racks are strong. Second, using all seven tiles in one turn is called a sweep and pays a flat 40 bonus points on top of the word. Third, the game does not end the moment somebody empties their tray. When the bag runs out, each player gets one final turn, and any tiles left in your tray at the end are not counted against you. Highest score wins, and nothing is deducted at the close.

That last rule is the one that changes how the endgame feels. In a traditional tile game, going out first is the goal because it ends the game and dumps your leftover tiles on the opponent. In Crossplay the arithmetic is gentler, so the final turns are a straight race for points rather than a scramble to avoid a penalty.

How to read a Crossplay board

A 15×15 board is 225 squares, and the ones that matter are the premium squares. Crossplay uses the same premium-square model as the tile games it descends from: some squares double or triple the value of a letter sitting on them, and some double or triple the whole word, which the Times guide describes as earning points for the letters and then applying the multipliers of the squares covered. Its worked example puts a double-word square and a double-letter square within reach of the center, which is why the opening placement matters so much.

Reading the board is a separate skill from finding a word, and the two get confused constantly. A modest word placed through the right lane can outscore a long word played into open space, and a big play can hand your opponent an even bigger reply. So when you look at a board, look for four things in this order.

1. Open premium lanes. A line of squares that starts near existing tiles and passes through a triple-word square is the single most valuable feature on the board. Both players can see it, so the question is who can reach it first.
2. The ends of existing words. Every word on the board has two ends, and each end is a potential hook. A word ending in a common letter is easy for your opponent to extend. A word ending in a C or a V is much harder, because of a detail covered below.
3. Parallel running room. A word with empty squares alongside it invites a parallel play, where your new word forms several short words in the perpendicular direction as well as its own score. Those perpendicular words are free points.
4. What your opponent can reach next. Every placement you make opens some squares and closes others. The habit worth building is to name, before you commit, the single best reply your opponent has.

The board is small enough to hold in your head once a game is underway. Fifteen by fifteen sounds large, but most of it stays empty for most of the game. The action concentrates in one or two regions, and the interesting squares are the ones adjacent to words that are already down.

The dictionary Crossplay uses, and the one this solver uses

This distinction matters more than any other on the page, so it comes early. The New York Times help centre states that Crossplay accepts words from the NASPA Word List, NWL 2023, with definitions taken from the Oxford English Dictionary. Where NASPA includes a word that Oxford has no definition for, the game falls back to the NASPA definition. Trademarks and proper nouns are excluded. The help centre points to the NASPA FAQ for disputed words.

The strategy guide The Times published for the game gives two useful numbers about that list. It says there are 107 playable two-letter entries in Crossplay, and it says there are no two-letter words containing a V or a C. Those two facts are worth memorising, and both are used later on this page.

This solver does not have the NWL 2023 file, and it is not going to pretend otherwise. It searches the same broad English dictionary that powers the rest of this site: 267,751 words, including plurals, inflections, archaic spellings and borrowed vocabulary. That list is wider than NWL 2023, which means every result here is a candidate rather than a guarantee. A word this page returns may still be rejected by the app. When that happens the app is right and this page is wrong, and no amount of solver output changes it.

The gap is easiest to see in the shortest words. This site's dictionary contains 124 two-letter words; Crossplay accepts 107. So the two-letter group in your results will usually be longer than the game's own list, and the extras are exactly the kind of obscure entry a strict tournament list rejects. Treat short results with more suspicion than long ones, not less.

Scoring, and the limits of what is published

What the New York Times states directly is that points are earned by the rarity of the letter and by where the word is placed on the board. Its strategy guide adds that players earn points for the total value of the letters, and that bonus squares double or triple the letters or words that cover them. A hook scores the main word plus the value of the word it created, which is why hooking is described in that guide as a way of piggybacking on your opponent's work. Parallel plays score the perpendicular words as well.

What the Times does not publish, at least not in its help centre or its strategy guide, is a complete per-letter table. That is worth saying plainly, because a lot of pages present one without saying where it came from.

The table below is compiled from four published reference pages — word.tips, WordFinder by YourDictionary, Crossplay Helper and The Word Finder — which agree on every single entry, and several individual values can be checked against the Times's own worked examples. The guide's QI example is the cleanest: a Q played on a triple-letter square next to an existing I is said to earn 31 points. That only works if Q is 10 and I is 1, with a single word multiplier. Its opening-move example uses V as a six-point letter and D as a two-point letter. Those are consistent with the table.

Add the right-hand column and you get exactly 100, which is the bag size the same reference pages report. That internal consistency is a check, not a proof, but it is the kind of check a fabricated table usually fails: numbers invented one at a time rarely sum to a round total by accident.

Two things follow from the table, and both are real strategic consequences rather than trivia. The first is that the letter values are compressed at the top. There is no ten-point letter sitting alone at the summit; J, Q and Z share the top value, and X sits just below at eight. The second is that the middle of the range is crowded. W at five, K and V at six, and B, F, G and Y at four means a handful of letters that are cheap in other games are genuinely valuable here. Holding a V is not a liability you tolerate until you can dump it. It is a six-point asset.

The blanks are worth a paragraph of their own. Three blanks in a hundred tiles is one more than the standard tile game, and a blank scores nothing itself. All four reference tables agree on the count, The Times guide refers to holding a blank, and a player posting on r/scrabble described seeing three zero-point tiles in the app. What a blank buys you is a sweep: seven tiles, one of them wild, is a far easier seven-letter word than seven specific letters.

How to use the solver

The workflow is deliberately short. Five steps, and the first four take less time than reading them.

1. Type the tray exactly. All seven letters, duplicates included. If you hold two E tiles, type two E's. A solver that treats your input as a set will offer words you cannot build.
2. Mark the blanks. One question mark per blank. Do not guess the letter the blank will become; the point of the question mark is that the solver tests every substitution and keeps the ones that make words.
3. Add the board word if you are hooking. If you are extending something already down, put it in the hook field and pick the end you are extending. Leave the field empty if you are playing into open space.
4. Narrow with the filters if the list is long. Starts with, contains and ends with are literal substring matches, and the exact-length selector collapses the output to one group.
5. Read the longest group first. Seven letters is a sweep and forty bonus points. If there is no sweep, work down the length groups rather than scanning the whole list.

The twelve-character limit is not arbitrary. Seven comes from your tray, and the extra five exist so you can type letters already on the board that you intend to build through without using the hook field. If you are playing a word that runs through an existing tile in the middle, type that tile along with your rack and add a contains filter for it. The solver will not know which letter is the board tile, but it will find the words.

The filters compose. Starts with ST, contains EA, ends with S, exact length seven gives you seven-letter words beginning ST, holding EA somewhere and ending in S. Each one is applied after the rack check, so an impossible filter returns an empty list rather than a wrong one. If a filter is impossible given your tray, the page says so instead of quietly showing you something else.

Entering a blank correctly

A blank is the one thing a solver cannot infer, and it is also the tile most often entered wrong. The convention here is a question mark, and it behaves the way a blank behaves on the board: it becomes whatever letter the word needs, and it costs nothing in tile value because a blank has none.

What the solver will not do is tell you which letter the blank became. It returns whole words, so you read the word and see the substitution for yourself. If you enter AEINRS? and the seven-letter group contains ANTSIER, the blank is standing in for the second T. That is usually obvious, and where it is not, the word itself is the answer to the question.

The blank changes the search more than any other single character, because it turns a fixed multiset into a nearly free one. Six letters and a blank is not a weaker rack than seven letters. In practice it is a stronger one, because the set of seven-letter words it can reach is much larger than the set any specific seventh letter would reach. If you hold a blank and skip it in the input, you have thrown away your best chance at a sweep.

What the hook builder does that a filter cannot

A plain ends-with filter checks the word's last letters. The hook builder does that plus one extra thing: it adds the board letters to your available tiles. Enter FIN in the board field, set the side to the end, hold an S, and the solver has F, I, N and S to work with. It returns words that begin with FIN and can be built from all four letters. FINS is the only match, and that is the point: board letters are not free, so a longer word that needs a letter you do not hold will not appear.

That difference matters when the board word is long. A three-letter board word eats three of your available letters, which means a seven-letter result needs four tiles from your tray and no more. Without the board letters in the pool, the solver would either miss the word or offer something you cannot pay for.

Direction is the part people get backwards, so here it is once. If the existing word is FIN and you are adding tiles after the N, the finished word begins with FIN, so you are extending the end. If you are adding tiles before the F, the finished word ends with FIN, so you are extending the front. The selector says which end of the board word you are touching, and the constraint follows from that.

Reading the results

Results are grouped by length, longest first, and each group heading carries the true count. Within a group the order is alphabetical, because there is no honest ranking available: without the board, every word of the same length built from the same rack has the same tile value, and ordering them by anything else would be decoration.

The small number next to each letter is that letter's published point value. It is there so you can see at a glance whether a candidate is carrying a premium letter. A seven-letter word holding a V and a W is worth more than a seven-letter word of common letters, and in a close game that difference decides which sweep you should prefer when a rack offers two. What the page will not do is total those numbers, for reasons set out above.

Entering the board instead of a single word

The tray solver answers a narrow question: which words can these letters build? That is useful on the opening move and close to useless in the middle of a game, because by then the board decides what is playable. A word has to fit the squares you can reach, and every cross word it creates has to be a word as well. The play finder exists for that second question. It takes the board and the tray together and returns placements rather than a word list. Entering the board is what turns a tray solver into a board solver, and it is the difference between a list of words and a list of plays.

The board is 15 squares by 15: the Times guide describes players “placing words on a 15x15 board”, and the help center calls it a shared gameboard. That number is why the input is shaped the way it is: fifteen lines, fifteen characters.

There are two ways in, and they suit different situations. On a desktop, with a board copied from a page or typed from a screenshot by hand, the paste box is faster: fifteen lines, one per row, with a full stop, a dash or a space for each empty square. On a phone, the grid is faster: tap a square, type a letter, and the cursor moves on by itself. Both write to the same board, so you can paste a rough position and then fix two squares by hand.

The paste parser is deliberately lenient about some things and strict about two. Lenient: lower case is accepted and converted, rows shorter than fifteen are padded with empty squares, and a board with fewer than fifteen rows is accepted with the remaining rows empty. Strict: a row longer than fifteen characters is an error rather than a guess, because a silent trim would move letters into the wrong columns, and a character that is neither a letter nor one of the three empty markers is an error rather than a skip, because a skipped character shifts the row in exactly the same way. Both errors name the row number so you can find the problem and fix it.

Leaving the board empty is not an error. It means no tiles are down yet, which is the state at the start of every game, and the finder switches to opening-move mode: it looks only at placements that cover the center square. The rule and its source are quoted below.

What the play finder counts as legal

Four conditions have to hold at once, and the finder applies all four before it shows you anything.

1. The main word is in the dictionary. The word read along the line through the squares you filled must be in the 267,751-word list described above. Not a prefix of a word and not a stem: the whole run, from the square before the first new tile to the square after the last.
2. Every cross word is in the dictionary too. A tile dropped beside an existing tile creates a second word at right angles, and that word has to be valid on its own. This is the condition human solvers forget most often, and it produces most of the rejections you will see if you check a placement by hand and this page refuses it. The help center describes a turn as placing tiles to form “one or more words”, which is why every word the placement creates is checked.
3. The play connects, or it is the opening move. The Times guide states that “with the exception of the first move, each placed word must connect to another”, and the help center describes turns as building “on existing tiles on the board”. The finder follows that literally: at least one new tile has to sit next to a tile that is already down. The one exception is the first move, which must cover the center square instead.
4. The tray can pay for it. Every empty square in the placement needs a letter. If a placement needs two B tiles and you typed one B, it is rejected. A question mark in the tray pays for one letter of the finder's choosing, and each result states which letter that was.

The finder also respects a rule that is easy to state and easy to break by hand: all the tiles you place must sit in one line, and the word they form is read through every square in that line, including the tiles that were already there. Placements that pass through an existing tile are included, which is what makes the results useful in a crowded position rather than only at the open edges. Placements that would leave a gap inside the word are not included, because the word read through the line would stop at the gap.

What the finder does not do is rank by points, and the next section explains why. It also does not model your opponent, the bag, or any seven-tile limit on a single play: it will show a placement that uses four of your seven tiles next to one that uses all seven, and the choice between them is yours. What it does promise is that the count at the top is the true number of placements that satisfy the four conditions for the dictionary on this site, with the cap on rendering stated separately.

Why the play finder shows base letter values, not a score

This is the part of the page where a solver is most tempted to invent something. A number labeled score is what people want, and it is easy to produce one that looks authoritative. This page does not, and the reason is specific rather than cautious.

A Crossplay score has at least four parts. The letters in the word have values, which the table on this page lists. Some squares multiply a letter or a whole word, and the Times guide describes the opening move in exactly those terms: it recommends a word of at least five letters that hits both a double-word square and a double-letter square near the center, and it gives two arrangements of the same five letters, DROVE with the E on the center for 24 and ROVED with the D on the center for 34, because the second doubles the V. The cross words add their own letter values and their own square multipliers. A sweep of all seven tiles adds 40. Only the first part is knowable from a tray and a board without the board layout.

So the layout was the thing to look for. The New York Times publishes Crossplay as a standalone mobile app, which its help center states directly, and the page at nytimes.com/games/crossplay is a download page for that app rather than a playable browser game. The scripts served with that page are the code for the download page itself, and a search of them found no grid of square types. No text I could read gives the layout: not the help center, not the strategy guide, not the app store listing.

The guide's two worked examples are not enough to reconstruct it. They constrain a few squares near the center, but more than one arrangement produces those two totals from the same five letters, and a layout guessed from two data points would likely be wrong on most of the 225 squares. A wrong multiplier is worse than no multiplier, because it turns a rough guide into a confident wrong number.

What is left is arithmetic that does not depend on the layout. The number beside each placement is the sum of the published values of the letters in the word, using the table further down this page, with a blank counting zero because zero is the value the table gives a blank. It includes letters that were already on the board, because they are part of the word. It does not include the cross words, the square multipliers or the sweep bonus. It is labeled Base for that reason, and it is comparable only between placements built from similar letters: a word holding a V will always show a higher base than a word of common letters, and that comparison is real even though the total is not.

If you want a real score, the app is the only source. Play the placement it likes, read the number it gives you, and use the base values here to decide which of two candidates is likely to be worth more before you commit. That is a smaller promise than a score, and it is one this page can keep.

Reading a placement in the results

Each line in the results answers four questions in the same order.

• The word, in capitals. This is the whole word as it will read on the board, including any letters that were already there. If the word is longer than the tiles you are holding, the difference is board letters, and the note beside it lists the tiles that actually leave your tray.
• The direction and the starting square. “Across, row 8, column 3” means the first letter of the word goes on row 8, column 3, and the word runs left to right. “Down, row 8, column 3” means the same square, running top to bottom. Rows and columns are numbered from 1 at the top left, so row 1 column 1 is the top-left square and row 15 column 15 is the bottom-right one.
• The tiles it takes. This lists the letters the placement removes from your tray, in the order they appear in the word. A note such as “? as T” means the placement spends one blank and the blank stands for T. If you hold two blanks and a placement uses one, the other stays in your tray.
• The base value. Letters only, no squares, as explained above.

Results are grouped by the length of the main word, longest first, because the longest placement is usually the one worth checking first and a sweep is forty bonus points that no shorter word can match. Within a group the order is alphabetical. That is not a ranking; with no square data there is nothing honest to rank by, so the order is one you can scan rather than one that claims to know best.

The list is capped at 200 placements, with the true total printed above it and a button that reveals the rest. The cap exists because a sparse board and a flexible tray can produce thousands of placements, most of them short, and a page that renders all of them at once is slower to read than one that shows the long ones first. The count itself is never capped.

The remaining tile tracker, and why it changes your decisions

Most solver pages stop at the word list. That is a mistake in this game, because Crossplay gives you something unusual: a tile bag you can reason about, a board you can see, and an opponent whose tray you cannot see but can infer. The tracker exists to turn that into an actual number.

Here is the arithmetic it is doing. The bag is reported at 100 tiles. Some are on the board in front of you. Seven are in your tray, or fewer if the bag is running out. Everything else is either still in the bag or in your opponent's tray. The tracker shows that remainder, per letter, after you click the tiles that have been played and after it subtracts your current tray.

What you do with that number is the interesting part. If the tracker says one V is still unseen and there is an open triple-letter square two rows away, you know your opponent's best remaining play involves that V, and you can decide whether to block the lane or take the points and accept the risk. If both blanks are still out, your opponent can hook almost anywhere, so leaving an easy two-letter hook on the board is a worse idea than it looked. If all three U tiles are accounted for, a Q in your tray is a Q without a U, and the short Q words become the plan rather than the fallback.

Three cautions, because a tracker that is used carelessly is worse than no tracker. First, it counts only what you tell it. If you forget a play, the number is wrong from that point on, and there is no way to detect the error. Second, it does not know your opponent's tray, so a letter shown as unseen may be sitting in front of them rather than in the bag. Third, the distribution itself is compiled rather than officially published, so treat the counts as a strong guide and the app as the authority.

The habit that makes it useful is small: click the tiles as they are played, while the move is still on screen. Reconstructing four turns of history from memory is exactly the kind of bookkeeping people get wrong.

What to do when you are stuck

Being stuck in a tile game is rarely a vocabulary problem. It is usually a search-order problem: you have been staring at the same arrangement of the same letters for two minutes and your eye has stopped generating alternatives. Four moves break the loop.

Change the frame, not the letters

Shuffle the tray. In the app this is one tap, and it is not a cosmetic feature. Human pattern matching is strongly order-dependent, so putting the same seven letters in a different sequence exposes words that were invisible a second earlier. If you are using this page, retype the rack in a different order and run it again. The list will be identical, but reading it after a deliberate reshuffle is different from reading it cold.

Work backwards from endings

English is generous with suffixes, and suffixes are the cheapest way into a long word. If your tray holds an S, an E and a D, then every four-letter stem you can find is potentially a five-letter past tense. If it holds an I, an N and a G, every four-letter verb is potentially a seven-letter word and a sweep. Read your rack looking for those three-letter endings first, then look for stems to attach them to.

Look for the shortest play that helps

A two-letter word that leaves the board awkward for your opponent is often better than a longer word that leaves you holding five vowels. The solver will show you both. What it cannot tell you is which one leaves a better tray, and in a game with a finite bag, the tray you keep is a resource.

Use the tracker to decide whether to defend

When you cannot find a play you like, the question becomes whether to block. The tracker answers that better than intuition does. If the premium letters are already gone, there is nothing much to block and you should take whatever scores. If they are all still unseen, the board is dangerous and a modest blocking play is worth more than its face value.

Opening, middle game and endgame

Crossplay compresses a tile game into a shorter arc than most, because two players drawing seven tiles each burn through a hundred-tile bag quickly. That means the three phases have distinct jobs, and playing the opening like the endgame is a common way to lose.

The opening move

The first word must cover the center square, and the New York Times strategy guide makes a specific recommendation about it: with a double-word square and a double-letter square a short distance away, the opening player should aim for a word of at least five letters that touches both. The guide's worked example is worth internalising because it shows how much placement matters even on turn one. DROVE with the E on the center is said to score 24, while ROVED with the D on the center doubles the V and scores 34. Same tiles, different order, ten points apart.

The lesson is not to memorise DROVE and ROVED. It is that on the opening move you have complete freedom of placement, and freedom of placement is worth more than the word. Rearrange your rack until the premium letter lands on the premium square.

The middle game

The middle of a Crossplay game is about hooks and parallel plays, and the guide is explicit about both. A hook adds a letter to an existing word: if FIN is on the board, an S makes FINS, and you score your main word plus the value of FINS. A parallel play runs alongside an existing word and creates short perpendicular words as a side effect, which the guide calls overlaps. Those perpendicular words are where the quiet points are.

Defence belongs here too, and the guide gives the sharpest version of it. Because there are no two-letter words containing a V or a C, a word ending in either letter is hard for your opponent to hook. The guide's own example is TARP: if TAR is on the board, playing a P on the far side to make TARP removes the STAR hook, because STARP is not a word. That is a defensive play that costs you nothing in score and removes an option from your opponent.

The endgame

The endgame rule is unusual and it inverts the usual instinct. When the bag empties, both players get one more turn. The guide quotes a strong player making the practical point: you want to be the one who empties the bag. If you leave one tile in it, your opponent gets two more turns while you get one. If you empty it, you each get one.

So in the last few turns, prefer the play that uses more tiles even when it scores slightly less. The score you give up is usually smaller than the extra turn you are buying. And because leftover tiles are not deducted at the end, there is no penalty to weigh against that decision, which makes it cleaner than the equivalent choice in other tile games.

Two-letter words, and why they dominate

The New York Times guide calls learning the two-letter words one of the fastest ways to become a stronger player, and puts the count at 107. That is a small enough list to memorise in a few sittings, and it pays in three separate ways.

First, two-letter words are hooks. They let you attach to almost anything, which converts a blocked board into a scoring opportunity. Second, they are the glue of parallel plays: a parallel word scores every perpendicular word it creates, and those perpendicular words are usually two letters long. Third, they score well relative to their length when they contain a premium letter, because the premium letter is a large share of a two-tile word.

The guide's example is precise and worth repeating. If your opponent leaves an I beside an open triple-letter square, putting a Q on that square to make QI scores 31. That is 31 points for two tiles, and it does not require a good rack, a good board, or a long word. It requires knowing that QI exists and that the Q can be placed there.

The negative list is just as useful. There are no two-letter words containing V or C, which means a word ending in either letter is genuinely hard to extend. When you have a choice between two plays of similar value, ending on a V or a C is a real defensive advantage, and the guide treats it as one.

One caveat about this page: because the dictionary here is broader than NWL 2023, the two-letter results you get will include entries the app does not accept. There are 124 two-letter words in this site's list against 107 in Crossplay. The extra seventeen are exactly the obscure entries a tournament list filters out, so if a two-letter result looks strange, assume it is one of them.

Common mistakes

• Typing the rack as a set. Two E tiles typed as one E produces words you cannot build. Duplicates are information, not noise.
• Guessing the blank. Entering a question mark lets the solver test all twenty-six substitutions. Entering your guess tests one.
• Chasing the longest word regardless of placement. The guide's own opening example has two anagrams of the same five letters ten points apart. Length is not score.
• Ignoring the two-letter group. It is the cheapest group to learn and it produces the most usable plays per hour of study.
• Leaving an easy hook. If the tracker says the S tiles are still out, an open word ending in a hookable letter is an invitation.
• Forgetting the sweep bonus. Forty points is larger than most words on the board. If a sweep exists, everything else is a comparison against it.
• Playing for the score and losing the turn. A big play that hands your opponent a triple-word lane is a trade, and sometimes a bad one.
• Trusting a solver over the app. The dictionary here is wider than NWL 2023. A rejection is information, not an error.

What this solver cannot do

Being clear about this is more useful than another feature. Five things are outside what this page can honestly deliver.

It cannot read an image of the board. There is no screenshot upload and no image parsing. The board has to be typed or pasted, square by square, and the finder works from that grid and nothing else. A photograph of a board cannot be handed to this page.

It cannot score a play. A Crossplay score is the letter values plus whatever the squares multiply plus every perpendicular word the play creates plus forty if you sweep. The letters are knowable, and the page adds them up as a base value; the square multipliers are not knowable, because the layout is not published. The section above sets out what was checked and where. Knowing one term of a sum is not knowing the sum, so the page shows the base value and stops there on purpose.

It cannot guarantee validity. The dictionary is 267,751 words of broad English. Crossplay uses NWL 2023. Everything here is a candidate.

It cannot see your opponent. The tracker estimates what is unseen; it cannot split that between the bag and your opponent's tray, and it cannot model what they are likely to play.

It cannot play the daily game for you. There is no daily puzzle feed on this site and no answer key. You type the letters you are holding. If you want a different kind of help with a different kind of puzzle, the Wordle solver and the Squareword solver cover guessing games, and the word games hub lists the rest.

Crossplay and the tile games it resembles

Crossplay sits in a family, and knowing which parts are inherited and which are new makes the game easier to learn.

From the family it takes the shared board, the seven-tile tray, the bag, the premium squares and the rule that words must connect. A 15×15 board and a seven-tile tray are the standard shape of the genre. What it changes is the tile values, the board design, the name and size of the all-seven bonus, and the endgame. The all-seven bonus is a sweep worth 40 points here; in Scrabble the equivalent is a 50-point bonus, which is one of the reasons a rack solver built for Scrabble will mislead you about which racks are strong in Crossplay.

The dictionary is also stricter than some of its neighbours. NWL 2023 excludes trademarks and proper nouns and is the list North American tournament players use, so a word that is fine in a casual app may be missing here. Our Scrabble solver works from a tournament-style list and is a useful cross-check when you are unsure whether a word is the kind of thing a strict list keeps.

What Crossplay adds that the older games do not have is the equal final turn. It removes the endgame penalty that shapes so much of traditional tile-game strategy, and it makes the last two turns a pure points race. It also adds Cross Bot, a post-game review that shows the strongest plays you missed. Full access to that is a subscriber feature, which makes it a study tool rather than something you can consult mid-game.

A short practice routine

Improvement at Crossplay is mostly repetition with feedback, and a ten-minute session is enough to get it. Deal yourself seven letters at random, hunt for a sweep without help, then run the rack and compare. The gap between what you found and what exists is the lesson, and it is far more specific than general vocabulary study. Do that for ten racks and you have ten precise pieces of feedback.

When you practise the two-letter list, do not just read it. For each entry, ask where it hooks and which premium letter it carries. That turns memorisation into placement practice, and placement is where the points actually are.

About the numbers on this page

Every factual claim here comes from a source that is linked in the sentence that makes it, and the sources fall into three groups.

Official. The New York Times help centre for the Crossplay app is the source for the seven-tile tray, the refill rule, the swap and pass rule, the 40-point sweep, the equal final turn, leftover tiles not counting, and the NWL 2023 dictionary. The New York Times company press release of 21 January 2026 is the source for the launch, the two-player format and the app. The Times's own strategy guide, published in October 2026, is the source for the 15×15 board, the center-square opening rule, the definition of a hook, the 107 two-letter entries, the absence of V and C two-letter words, the QI example and the endgame advice. The NYT Open engineering post is a second official source for the 15×15 grid and its 225 cells.

Compiled. The tile distribution and per-letter values come from four reference pages that agree on every entry, and the internal check is that the counts sum to 100. The Times does not publish this table itself. It is presented as a compilation, it is labelled as one, and the page tells you to prefer your app if they disagree.

This site. The dictionary size, the 124 two-letter word count, and every statement about what this tool does are facts about this page, and you can check the first two by opening the dictionary file that loads with it.

What is deliberately absent: any claim about the exact layout of the bonus squares, any claim about the center square's multiplier, any total score, and any statement about how the game's internal matching algorithm behaves. Those are things no solver can know from the letters and the board alone, and guessing at them would make the rest of the page less trustworthy rather than more.