The New York Times offers a variety of engaging word and puzzle games, including Flashback, Connections, and Strands, each testing different cognitive skills. Flashback is a visual-historical puzzle game where players place events in chronological order, providing an educational dive into history with a perfect score of 28 points. Connections challenges players to group 16 words into four categories, demanding a keen sense of word associations, with hints to aid in solving the puzzle. The game has become popular on social media for its tricky and unique categories. Strands, another word game, offers a more opaque challenge by providing minimal hints and no word list, making it more time-consuming and brain-teasing compared to other games.