Connections

Connections is the New York Times daily word puzzle about finding groups that share a common thread. The board holds sixteen words, and four hidden categories of four are buried in it. You submit four words at a time: a correct set locks in and names the category it shared, a wrong one costs one of the four mistakes the board allows. Every solved group takes a colour that ranks how hard it was, from Yellow up to Purple, so the finished board doubles as a difficulty ladder. What separates it from a guess-the-word game is that nothing is deduced from spelling. The difficulty sits in the words that look at home in two categories at once, and the whole task is choosing which reading the puzzle intends. The New York Times publishes one dated board a day, in a web browser and on iOS and Android.

1. Open the day’s Connections puzzle.
2. Look for words that plausibly share a precise common thread.
3. Select the four words you are surest of, because a wrong set spends one of your four mistakes.
4. Submit a proposed group and use the result to reconsider the remaining words.
5. Clear the three remaining groups before the four mistakes run out.

It rewards semantic precision and pattern recognition more than vocabulary size alone. It suits players who enjoy talking themselves out of an obvious grouping, and anyone who prefers a puzzle whose answer is a category rather than a word. Skip it if you want a long sitting, a difficulty setting, or room to brute force the answer: there is one dated board a day and four mistakes to spend on it. A session runs as long as it takes to submit the four groups, which makes it a short break rather than an evening.

A correct submission locks its four words in place and names the category they shared; a wrong one spends one of the four mistakes, and the board is lost once all four are gone. A valid group is assigned its difficulty colour: Yellow is the easiest, then Green, Blue and Purple. A daily puzzle is won by completing all four groups in fewer than four mistakes. After the last submission, the results page offers statistics and sharing; the statistics include completed puzzles, win rate, current and maximum streaks, perfect puzzles and a mistake histogram.

Daily puzzle

The official game page presents a dated daily puzzle.

• Name the exact relationship before submitting a group; a broad resemblance is not necessarily the intended connection.
• Keep a candidate group provisional until its four members are mutually consistent.
• Start with the group you can state in a single phrase; a category you can only describe vaguely is usually the trap.
• When a word looks at home in two categories, hold it back and let the groups you lock first decide where it belongs.
• Spend a mistake only on a set you would defend, because four wrong submissions end the board.