A Fun New Emoji Game Is Coming to Apple News in iOS 26
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Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote may have been less eventful than others in recent years, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t packed with many new goodies for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and other Apple devices. It’s just that Apple was more focused this year on unifying its operating system brand into a more tight-knit family.
However, like most WWDC keynotes, there’s never enough time for Apple to cover everything that’s new in each of its operating system releases. Apple spent nearly a third of the keynote — 28 minutes — solely talking about iOS 26, and it still ended with a 6×6 grid of features that it hadn’t touched on — and even those were likely the tip of the iceberg.
One that flew entirely under the radar until I opened Apple News in the first iOS 26 developer beta is a new puzzle experience integrated into the company’s news app.
Undoubtedly inspired by popular news sites like The New York Times, which has had a rich puzzle section for years, Apple added crossword puzzles to the News app two years ago in iOS 17.
However, it didn’t stop there. iOS 17.5 introduced Quartiles in the spring of 2024 and daily Sudoku puzzles in iOS 18.2 in December, with three levels of difficulty.
While crosswords (and mini crosswords) and Sudoku are well-known games, Quartiles was something entirely different. Now, Apple is getting even more creative with another fun new game for Apple News+ subscribers in iOS 26.
Welcome to The Emoji Game
The premise of the Emoji Game is straightforward, but it requires a new layer of creative intelligence that goes beyond the usual word puzzles. While crosswords require you to turn ideas into words, and Quartiles has you putting word fragments together to form complete words, the Emoji Game is about figuring out what word a group of glyphs represents and then dragging them into blank spaces to complete a phrase.
Each puzzle has three phrases and six groups of emoji — two per phrase. The goal is to place each of the six emoji in the correct spots in as few moves as possible, with six moves representing a perfect score.
The phrases provide a simplified clue of one or two words. You can expand each of these by tapping, but that counts as a move.
I’ve already played a few rounds, and it’s more challenging than it looks, as the meanings behind the emoji groups aren’t always clear at the outset, but they’re also obvious once you put it all together. It’s a clever puzzle as you have to look at it from both sides to put it all together, moving back and forth between figuring out what the phrases might say and what the emojis represent.
It’s even trickier as the emoji words can cross over letters and spaces. For instance, in the puzzle shown above, one group of emoji with two bows was very obviously BOWS, while another group that included a wide-eyed face, a couch, and three TVs represented the word BINGE which completed a clue for “Mingling…” for which the answer was “RUBBING ELBOWS.” I would have never come up with “BINGE” had I not interpreted the clue to figure out what likely fit in there, but “BOWS” was also the obvious one needed to get me started.
As with the other puzzles in Apple News, the Emoji Game requires a News+ subscription, integrates with the new Games app (which is effectively the new Game Center), and maintains a scoreboard of streaks and top and average scores. Even though the first iOS 26 developer beta only launched on Monday, there’s already a back catalog of Emoji Game puzzles going back to May 30, 2025.
