The Genius of Spelling Bee

Update: Since this article was published, The Times has launched a daily Spelling Bee discussion forum for fans of the game. A collection of these forums can be found here and a glossary of terms used in the forum is here.

In the silence and darkness of Deb Koker’s Bedford, Mass., bedroom, the alarm rings and her eyes pop open. At 3 a.m., this would be an annoyance to most people, but Ms. Koker reaches for her cellphone and eagerly taps an icon on the screen.

This is an hour when most people on the East Coast are still asleep, but Ms. Koker, an engineer and a lawyer, does not have insomnia. The daily Spelling Bee game has just been published online and, while the rest of her family is slumbering peacefully, she can solve the beehive-shaped puzzle without interruption.

Spelling Bee — a puzzle in which players try to make words from a set of seven unique letters while using the center letter at least once — is the first of five digital games created by The New York Times Games team. The print version debuted in The New York Times Magazine in 2014, and the online game launched on May 9, 2018. And, while The Times does not share player information, the digital game has been a roaring success, both in terms of the number of subscribers who play the game and the passion that devotees show for it.

In less than an hour, on average, Ms. Koker has conquered the game and, sometime before 4 a.m., she logs on to Twitter to post her score. As is the case on most days, she has reached Queen Bee, an Easter egg level that is not part of the regular scoring of the game, which starts at Beginner and ends officially at Genius. Reaching Queen Bee meant that she had surpassed the Genius level and found all of the words on that day’s list.