Apple’s New Emoji Game Comes to iOS 18
Toggle Dark Mode
One of the surprises in last month’s preview of iOS 26 was a fun new Emoji game for Apple News+ subscribers. Now, in recognition of World Emoji Day, Apple has brought the new game to folks on the latest public releases of iOS 18.
The Emoji game has been available to Apple News+ subscribers since the first iOS 26 developer beta arrived in early June. At the time, it came with a back catalog of Emoji puzzles dating back to May 30, and new puzzles have been showing up daily (I only broke my streak once).
However, today Apple officially announced that Emoji Game is available to Apple News+ subscribers in the US and Canada on all iPhones, iPads, and Macs running at least iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, or macOS Sequoia 15.4.
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.
Lauren Kern, editor-in-chief of Apple News
This also marks the first time Apple has shared anything official about the new game outside of the introductory instructions in the News app. As explained in the press release, the game challenges players to interpret groups of emojis to fill in the blanks for three short phrases in as few moves as possible. What’s notable is that Apple reveals that it will also use Genmoji created using Apple Intelligence, which means the sky’s the limit for the types of words and phrases it can try to express.
As I wrote in June, the Emoji Game requires a new layer of creative intelligence, as the meaning of the glyphs isn’t always obvious. The selections are also sometimes pretty whimsical, such as today’s debut puzzle for iOS 18 users, which has one group showing a black turtleneck, a pair of blue jeans, an Apple, and an iPhone. I’ll avoid sharing any spoilers, but the translation should be relatively obvious to any Apple fan.
Today’s puzzle also includes Apple’s calendar emoji, which happens to show today’s date. While that emoji deliberately aligns with today being World Emoji Day, the connection is the opposite of what you might think. It was Apple’s Calendar emoji that came first and inspired the day, as The New York Times reported ten years ago:
Jeremy Burge, emoji afficianado and founder of a website called Emojipedia, has created a social media campaign called World Emoji Day, which he set for July 17 based on the calendar shown on iPhones.
Kathryn Varn, The New York Times
Apple’s decision to use July 17 for the calendar emoji also wasn’t arbitrary. It was an Easter egg from a piece of Apple history: Apple announced iCal on July 17, 2002, noting that it would be available as a free download for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. At the time, Apple was the only company using July 17 in its emoji glyph; as the Times explained, Twitter used July 15 back then, while Android showed no date at all. That’s changed in the years since, likely as a result of World Emoji Day’s official status, but the initial date was ultimately a result of Apple’s iCal launch 23 years ago.
About Emoji Game
Each puzzle includes six groups of emojis, which are typically used to fill in two blanks in each of three phrases, each of which provides a short clue fragment to help you along.
A perfect score is six, which equals getting every emoji in the right spot on the first try. You can also expand the clues by tapping on them, but that counts as a move. There’s no limit on the number of moves, so you can drop the emojis in randomly until they end up in the right places; in theory, the worst score you could get would be 24, assuming you revealed all three clues and then still managed to get every single possible wrong combination before landing on the correct ones.
Each puzzle requires you to consider both sides, as the meanings behind the emoji groupings aren’t always readily apparent, and sometimes only make sense when you see how they fit into what the phases might say. The fact that emoji words can also cross over letters and spaces adds an extra wrinkle.
For instance, in the puzzle shown below from June, one group of emojis with two bows is BOWS, while another group that included a wide-eyed face, a couch, and three TVs represented the word BINGE.
This filled in a clue for “Mingling…” for which the answer was “RUBBING ELBOWS.” While “BOWS” was an easy one to get me started, I would have had a hard time coming up with “BINGE” on its own; it took the clue to help me interpret what the amalgam of a couch and three TVs could mean.
Emoji Game (Apple is conspicuously omitting a “The” on the front of this) joins the other rich selection of games for Apple News+ subscribers, including Crosswords and Mini Crosswords from iOS 17, Quartiles from iOS 17.5, and the daily Sudoku puzzles added in iOS 18.2. Like the other games, Emoji Game requires an Apple News+ subscription and maintains a scoreboard that tracks streaks, top scores, and average scores. It also integrates with the new Games app in iOS 26, as Apple also points out in its press release.
