Wordle, which celebrated its 1,000th puzzle in March, might be the headline-grabbing star of The New York Times’ online game stable, but Connections, released last June, is its dark horse. Lately, I’ve been finding myself much more thrilled when I finish a Connections puzzle without making any mistakes than when I solve Wordle in just a few guesses.
Read more: Wordle Player Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in the English Language
The name describes the game well. Connections is a game where you look at a grid of 16 words and pick four words that have a connection to each other. You do this four times, until all 16 words in the puzzle are grouped. The tough part is that Times associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu chooses words that could fit in multiple groups. The obvious guess — hey! those are four animals! — is almost always going to be wrong.
There are four different difficulty levels in each game — each group of four fits in one. Yellow is the easiest, then green, then blue, and the hardest is purple, smugly labeled “tricky” by the NYT gamesters. If you make four mistakes, you lose, and the game shows you the answers.
And Connections indeed loves to trick you. One puzzle included the words “Sponge,” “Bob,” “Square” and “Pants,” but those words didn’t fit in the same category. All of them went in separate groups. Another wanted you to group together the words “Expose,” “Rose,” “Pate,” and “Resume,” as four words that are pronounced differently with accent marks. If you saw that one coming, you’re a better Connections player than I.
One of my favorite jokes about Connections comes from a tweet by Jelisa Castrodale, who wrote, “I do the NYT’s Connections every morning and then spend the rest of the day hating myself because I didn’t realize those four names were all doomed whaling ships built in 1832.” Yep, that’s pretty much my life.
Note that Connections is pretty much the same game as Connecting Wall from the BBC quiz show Only Connect. Even…
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