We’ve mentioned the New York Times games I like to play here enough that I think it’s fitting that for one of these final few posts of the year I share some of the stats the app shared with me recently.

I didn’t love their version of ‘Wrapped’, which they call ‘Year in Games’, but it captures what I’ve done in a little snapshot.

It took me a bit to understand the format of their share - it went game by game…and it told me I solved a puzzle on 344 days of the year. At first I wondered why it wasn’t 365 (because I play it every day)…then I realized it was only Wordle that it was showing me.

So I guess that’s not bad - only 21 days of the year I couldn’t solve the Wordle. Feels like it should be more, since I never have huge streaks. But I like that stat.

My best Wordle of the year was back in February - I solved ‘Pupil’ in two. That was a long time ago. Maybe in a year I’ll be more impressed at my Wordle performance. (My average day was 4.18 guesses.)

(I should add here that the image above left was what popped up under my profile when I went looking for the ‘Year in Games’ again to write about it…I like that little snapshot of what I’ve done almost better than the ‘Year in Games’ itself.)

(And I might also mention that 0 under the Crossword streak is not a bad thing - it’s actually healthy. Sometimes on the Sunday crossword I get one square wrong and spend way too much time parsing through it again to find my tiny mistake. I’ve graduated to just revealing the answers and taking the L and finding out I put a past tense with a word that ends in ‘e’ instead of an ‘s’ or something like that and that’s a hard thing for me to accept but it’s also a sign of growth that I am able to break a streak. [My crossword streaks tend to be the longest streaks of any of the games. Not to brag. Just stating the facts.])

I’ve mentioned before I have had a good year of Spelling Bee…I don’t know that the ‘Year in Games’ accurately captures just how good I am at it. It tells you the total number of words you found, your longest word, how many pangrams you’ve gotten - but I have no context for any of it so it’s kind of meaningless. I had 332 geniuses and 2 queen bees (finding all the words), which is a pretty good breakdown out of 365 days.

To be honest, I could have done without any Connections or Srands recaps - those did nothing for me.

Maybe there could have been more time spent on the Spelling Bee stats. (And I don’t need a message from the Spelling Bee editor either, thank you very much.)

I think I like getting these end-of-year wraps for the most part.

Sometimes - like the New York Times games - I’m not expecting one and I don’t think about it until it’s here.

And to be honest, I wouldn’t really have missed it if this didn’t come.

So that’s a valuable lesson, I think, that applies to so much more than an end-of-the-year marketing opportunity:

Just because you can do something that everyone else is doing doesn’t mean you have to…or that you should.