Showing its growing interest in games, Apple announced its Apple News+ division has created Emoji Game, an internally produced original puzzle game.
The title challenges subscribers to use emoji to complete short phrases. Emoji Game is now available in English for Apple News+ subscribers in the U.S. and Canada.
“Emoji Game is the perfect addition to the Apple News+ suite of word and number puzzles, turning the emoji we use every day into a brainteaser that’s approachable and fun,” said Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News, in a statement.
In June, Apple also announced the Apple Games App to help games get discovered and to connect gamers.
News+ puzzles launched two years ago, and now Apple has a number of the games like crossword, mini crossword, an original word game called Quartiles and the logic game Sudoku.
Now Emoji Game is the fifth title, which is part logic and part word and something that Apple says only it could deliver. It’s available exclusively in the U.S. for subscribers for English speaking news, plus subscribers in Canada.
The name of the game is to communicate with emojis, with the goal of solving a puzzle with the least number of moves possible using emojis. Apple recently added genmoji to use Apple Intelligence to create new emojis. This gives the puzzle constructors more ways to be creative.
How it works
Emoji Game challenges players to use a selection of emoji — including Genmoji created using Apple Intelligence — to fill in the blanks of three short phrases using as few moves as possible. Each phrase is accompanied by a clue, which the user can choose to reveal, but that will count toward the player’s total number of moves.
Results can be tracked on Game Center leaderboards, or shared with friends and family through Messages, Mail, social media, or other platforms. Subscribers can access daily and archived Emoji Game puzzles in the Puzzles section of the Apple News app. Apple News+ subscribers will also be able to access Emoji Game this fall through the Apple Games app, an all-new destination designed to help players jump back into the games they love, find their next favorite, and have more fun with friends.
To learn how to play, you go to a game board. Your job is to complete words and phrases with emojis. You tap an emoji and drag it to complete a word in the puzzle. This takes some lateral thinking, as emojis can have multiple meanings. You might think the applicable word for two things together is a “pair,” or it might be “fruit.” Emojis can span both letters and words in the game. There’s a clue available, but you only start out with part of a solved puzzle, with a number of blank spaces.
If you try to solve part of the puzzle, dragging something over to the puzzle, it will cost you one move. It may not solve the entire puzzle if you get it right. But it can move you forward. Again, the idea is to solve the puzzle with as few moves as possible. Your goal is to solve a puzzle each day with as little as six moves or less.
If a puzzle has the name of Ryan Gosling in it, you might solve a big part of it finding an emoji for a “sling,” which has the latter part of the actor’s name in it. Other clues may lead you to the actress Margot Robbie, and eventually you may get to the Barbie movie, which starred Gosling and Robbie.
You can invite up to 16 friends or family members to see who gets the lowest score on a leaderboard.
Emoji Game joins existing Apple News+ puzzles like crossword, crossword mini, Quartiles, and Sudoku.
Apple News+ provides subscribers with access to content from more than 400 top publications, including an expansive selection of local publications like the recently added Tampa Bay Times, The Minnesota Star Tribune, and The Washington Post.
In addition to Apple News+ Puzzles, subscribers also get access to a dedicated Sports section featuring content about users’ favorite teams from local and national publications, as well as a newly introduced Food section, which offers subscribers access to tens of thousands of recipes and culinary stories from top food publishers.
Apple News offers millions of people in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. access to quality journalism from a variety of top publications, curated by its team of editors. A subscription is available for $12.99 per month in the U.S., £12.99 in the UK, $16.99 in Canada, and $19.99 in Australia.
It’s available with iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 or later. It’s available on the iPad, iPhone and Mac.
Apple News+ launched about six years ago, and now it has access to some of the world’s biggest publications, like the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. There are now over 400 premium titles. Subscribers can get access to audio stories, local news, sports, and more.