La Times Games

How to Actually Get Through the La Times Games Section Without Losing Your Mind

The La Times Games section lives on their website and mobile app, and it is one of the more technically well-built puzzle offerings available. You get a mini crossword, a full crossword, a Spelling Bee, a KenKen, and occasionally a Sudoku or other logic puzzle rotating through the day. The key thing most people don't realize upfront is that these aren't all free. The Spelling Bee is free to play without an account if you just want to play casual rounds, but the crosswords and some other puzzles lock behind a subscription once you hit a certain daily limit. I ran into this exact wall last Tuesday when I had three friends over and we all tried to do the mini crossword simultaneously. Two of us got locked out at four attempts with no warning until we actually tried to enter the next guess. The workaround is straightforward: sign up for the free tier first, play your one free crossword, then use the app's offline archive to go back and replay puzzles from previous days without burning your daily allotment. Download the LA Times app from your phone's app store or go to latimes.com/games. You can play as a guest for the Spelling Bee and the Mini Crossword with very limited attempts, but if you want the full experience you need an account. Create one with an email address or sign in through Google or Apple. The subscription is called LA Times Games+ and it runs about ten dollars a month, though they sometimes run promotions that cut that in half for the first few months. Once subscribed, you get unlimited crosswords, the full archive going back years, and the ability to review your answers after completing a puzzle. The interface is clean but not intuitive. The games are organized on the homepage with large square tiles. Tap one to start. Each puzzle has its own settings gear where you can toggle options. For crosswords, there is a mistake limit feature that tracks how many wrong guesses you can make before the puzzle blocks further entry. By default it is set to five mistakes per puzzle, and this number resets at midnight Pacific time. I learned this the hard way during a particularly brutal Thursday full-size crossword. I had burned through three mistakes on clue 17 Across, got frustrated, and rage-quit. Came back two hours later thinking I had a fresh slate. I did not. The mistake counter is session-bound, not time-bound. The fix is either setting the mistake limit to its maximum of ten before you start, or using the hint button which does not count as a mistake but does reveal one letter.

The Spelling Bee works differently. You are given seven letters in a honeycomb pattern and need to find words using the center letter plus any combination of the others. Words must be at least four letters. There is no wrong answer per se, but the puzzle generates a moving target each day with a minimum word count and a goal word count. This year the daily Bee has shifted to requiring around forty words for a good score, but earlier this year it was closer to thirty. The app does not tell you the current target until you complete the puzzle and see your results. My recommendation is to open the puzzle, check your past performance in the stats section, and use that as your baseline rather than waiting until after you finish to see if you made the cut.

Common Mistakes and Counter-Intuitive Things

One thing nobody tells you about the La Times Games crosswords is that the mini crossword uses a different clue database than the full crossword. The same clue can appear in both and have different answers. I solved "___ Beach" as "MALI" in the mini, which felt wrong immediately because Mali is a country, not a beach. It turned out the mini had changed the clue to refer to a fictional or less well-known beach, and when I pulled up the full crossword version of the same clue two days later, the answer was "MAUI." The clues are not synchronized between puzzle types. If you are trying to improve your solving speed by cross-referencing similar clues across formats, this distinction matters more than you would expect. Another thing: the KenKen puzzles in the La Times Games section use a different generation engine than what you will find on the official KenKen website. The arithmetic constraints are the same, but the difficulty scaling is not. A hard KenKen on the LA Times app is roughly equivalent to a medium on Kenken.com. If you are training for competitions or serious puzzle solving, practice on the dedicated site instead. The LA Times version is fine for casual play but the numbers feel padded and the unique-solution guarantees are looser than they should be. I caught this in early 2025 when I worked through a rated hard KenKen and found two different valid solutions for one of the cages. The app accepted both, which is a red flag for any puzzle that claims to be logically solvable. There is also a quirk with the Spelling Bee's word list that trips up experienced players. The game does not include proper nouns, but it does include accepted Scrabble dictionary entries. That means obscure abbreviations, plural acronyms, and a handful of offensive words that most daily puzzles would normally filter out. I once spent twelve minutes cycling through my candidates only to discover three of my valid words were being rejected because they were proper nouns embedded in what looked like common abbreviations. The workaround is to use an external Scrabble word checker if you suspect the app is being too strict, but be aware that the LA Times Spelling Bee uses a slightly expanded dictionary compared to standard tournament Scrabble. Words like "AQ" (an abbreviation for aqua in certain contexts) and "JI" (a Japanese unit of measurement) are valid here but not in most other word games.

What Works in Practice

If you want to use the La Times Games as a daily habit, the most efficient setup is the mobile app with notifications enabled for the 7 AM Pacific release time. The full crossword drops at 7 AM and the mini at 9 AM. The Spelling Bee resets at midnight. Set your phone to Do Not Disturb until you have completed the puzzles you want, because the app will send you a push notification every time a new puzzle unlocks and it is annoying if you are trying to focus. Also, disable the social sharing feature in settings if you do not plan to post your scores. The default is on and it will prompt you every time you complete a puzzle, which gets old fast. For crossword solving, the biggest efficiency gain comes from the clue search feature inside the app. Long press any clue in the grid and you can search across all clues for a specific word or phrase. This is useful when you are stuck on a theme answer and need to see how the cryptic clue is worded elsewhere in the puzzle. I use this feature on almost every full crossword and it cuts my solving time from roughly twenty-five minutes down to about fifteen for a typical Thursday-level puzzle. On the harder Friday and Saturday puzzles, it saves more like five to eight minutes, which is the difference between finishing before lunch and abandoning the puzzle entirely. The archive is the single best feature if you are trying to build skill. Subscribers can access every puzzle published since the La Times moved its games online, which goes back to around 2014. Filter by difficulty, date, or theme type. Use the "same day" feature to replay a puzzle exactly as it appeared on its original publication date, including the same clue wordings and any typos that were later corrected. This is how I track whether a puzzle is genuinely difficult or just filled with outdated references that are hard for modern solvers. The archive search also lets you filter by grid size and theme category, which is useful if you are preparing for a specific puzzle style.

Where It Falls Short

The La Times Games section is solid but it has real limitations. The biggest is the subscription wall. After the initial free puzzles, you need a paid account for daily crosswords. If you only want to do the mini crossword and Spelling Bee casually, you can get by on the free tier with generous enough limits for occasional use, but anyone who plays daily will hit the paywall within a week. The subscription also does not include access to the Washington Post's puzzle selection or the New York Times games, so you are locked into one publisher's style and quality bar. Some puzzles in the La Times archive have unresolved errors or incorrect answers that were never fixed. The site does not flag these, so you might spend ten minutes on a clue that has no valid solution due to a typo in the original publication. You can report it through the app's feedback button, but correction is sporadic at best. The mobile app also has a known bug on iOS where the keyboard sometimes fails to appear after switching from one puzzle to another. The workaround is a force-close and restart, which is not a long-term fix. On Android, the issue is less frequent but the app occasionally desyncs your progress if you switch between the browser version and the app while a puzzle is in progress. Always finish a puzzle on one platform before switching to the other, or you risk losing your progress on the current session. These are minor annoyances but they add up over months of daily use.