Honestly, ever since the New York Times announced it was sunsetting Vertex, I’ve been in denial about it all. How could they kill the one game that was almost completely behind a paywall?
Paying for the New York Times Games wasn’t something on my radar until I came across Vertex earlier this year. One day I was seeing what else NYT Games had to offer besides Wordle and Connections. While I enjoyed the Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee, and sometimes Letter Boxed, the connect-the-dots style Vertex easily became my favorite.
Unlike all of the other games (except for Tiles), Vertex has no time limit, no points, no move limits. It presents a puzzle of the day where you connect lines together to form triangles, which eventually produces an image of the day.
Usually, the challenging aspects of games are what entice me the most. I love getting Wordle in two, the Mini in under thirty seconds, the most points in Spelling Bee or the fewest moves in Letter Boxed. Another game I frequent from time to time is Immaculate Grid, a three-by-three grid where you fill in a sports player who matches the criteria of the grid (e.g., Who played for both the Atlanta Braves and Pittsburgh Pirates?). Even with this game, the challenge is to find the most obscure player to match each square to get the lowest rarity score possible (Jose Bautista simply won’t do for this, but Wil Ledezma might).
But with Vertex…you just connect lines.
I don’t know exactly why I became so attached to the game. One reason might be the paywall. The New York Times allows you to try the game before blocking off access. Sometimes, however, if you worked your way to the webpage through a certain combo of link clips, you’d be able to get in.
Perhaps the challenge of accessing the game became the game for me. There were some days where being able to do the daily puzzle was as easy as going straight to the URL. There were other days where I was able to get in after several attempts. Then there were other days when no matter what I did, I could not play it.
Part of what I’ve come to love about the game is the ease of putting it down and coming back later. Unlike Connections or Spelling Bee, where leaving the app is an act of frustration. I leave the app only when I’m failing.
But with Vertex, it’s impossible to fail. If the dots you connect aren’t where they’re supposed to go, it simply shows a white triangle instead of a filled-in triangle, and you can press the redo button to go back. When it’s time to do something else, I can put it down and happily come back to finish it later.
I don’t completely understand the rationale behind removing the game. The New York Times claims that it wants to focus on their other news games, but this isn’t some endless game where they needed to create thousands of puzzles a month.
In the same way studios would rather write off completed movies rather than release them, it feels like this was certainly a game that could’ve been kept around behind a paywall to continue letting enthusiasts enjoy it.
Alas, the decision is made and I’m left trying to find something that will fill the void.
Mitchell Barbee graduated from Calvin University with a B.A. in writing in 2021. Originally from Boone, North Carolina, he is currently residing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He enjoys hanging out with the few friends who stayed, wearing grey hoodies, and hoping that he doesn’t get sucked into the nightly wormhole of watching a baseball game.
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I’m as sad as you are and am also trying to fill the Vertex void!
Vertex had become my very favorite game, which I lord forward to playing daily.
I was really sad when the New York Times decided to discontinue this game in the really is no other game like it that I can find.
#BringBackVertex it was such a calming game. As you said, no timers, no limited guesses, just a break from life’s stressors.
Hey! I recommend https://www.nodes-game.com that might help you fill the void. It is not the same as Vertex, but they do much larger patterns.