What Happened to NYT Digits?

Digits launched as a New York Times Games public beta on 10 April 2023. Each day brought five puzzles of rising difficulty; in each, you combined six given numbers with add, subtract, multiply, and divide to reach a target. Every number could be used once, intermediate results could be reused, and scoring was forgiving: three stars for the exact target, two within 10, one within 25 — up to fifteen stars a day. If that sounds like the numbers round from the UK game show Countdown, that was the near-universal comparison.

It never left beta. The Times announced the shutdown in late July 2023 and switched it off on 8 August 2023, saying the beta was always time-limited and that the team was refocusing on its other games. No official archive or app survives — which is exactly why the search traffic does.

It lived at nytimes.com/games/digits — see below for where to play now. NYT Digits is its own game by its own makers — NerdleBuddy is not affiliated with it (or with Nerdle); this guide is our independent take.

• Engaging Data's Digits remake — a free, faithful recreation — including an archive of the original NYT puzzles.
• Countle — a daily Countdown-style numbers round: same six-numbers-to-a-target mechanic.

You can't, officially — but the mechanic is alive and well. Engaging Data's free remake recreates the game faithfully and hosts an archive of the original NYT puzzle sets, which is as close to the real thing as exists. Countle serves the same six-numbers-to-a-target ritual with fresh dailies. And the broader family — Countdown's numbers round, target-building games of every stripe — was here before Digits and will outlast us all.

If what you actually miss is the daily maths ritual rather than the specific mechanic, that's a different prescription: a hidden-equation game gives you the same five arithmetic minutes with a deduction loop instead of open-ended construction. Nerdle is the standard-bearer there, and it publishes every day without a beta clock.