The NYT’s Connections is a brain-stretching game, the kind that will make you go “well, of course these words belong together,” and then: “oh, wait.” All you have to do is divide the 16 words or phrases into four groups of four, but the groupings can be tricky. I’m going to explain how the game works, but also how you’ll need to think about it to play it well.
I have an explainer here on the difference between Wordle, Strands, and Connections—all are NYT word games, but each one has a different flavor of gameplay and rewards different skills. Connections is best if you like wordplay and references to general knowledge. But you also have to have a high tolerance for being tricked, because this game makes liberal use of words’ double meanings, in deliberately devious ways. And if you get stumped, you can always check out our daily hints.
Where to play Connections
Connections is a New York Times game, so it’s available on the paper’s Games page and in their Games app. A new, numbered puzzle is available every day, much like the daily Wordles.
How to play Connections
The game presents you with 16 tiles that each have a word or short phrase on them. On each move, your job is to select four tiles that you think form a group. Groups are usually the same type of thing (like HAIL, RAIN, SLEET, SNOW) but there’s usually at least one grouping that relies on wordplay. For example, one puzzle grouped DOUBT, SHADOW, MOVIE, and VOTE—those are all things you can cast.
If you’re wrong, the tiles will shake. If you’re close, you’ll get a message that says “one away” to let you know you had three of them right. If you’re right, a colored bar will appear near the top of the board (showing the four words as well as revealing their theme) and any remaining tiles in play will rearrange into the bottom of the board.
You have four mistakes available. When you run out, the game is over, and you’ll get to see the answers you missed.
Even though there are four groups, you only need to figure out three of them. By the end, there will be four tiles remaining that have to be in the same group. For some extra puzzle-y fun, try to figure out the theme before you submit that last group for your gimme point.
Why Connections can be so frustrating (and how to avoid dumb mistakes)
The game is designed to be tricky. The puzzle designers will often put in a group of five or more words that fit the same category, but obviously only four of them can make up a legal group. Or they’ll take four things that could go together, but assign each one to a different category based on a double meaning that each word has.
To give you an example, in my first-ever attempt at this game, I submitted an obvious grouping: RAIN, HEAT, SNOW, and SLEET. Not a valid group, the game told me. Huh?
But a moment later that “Huh?” was replaced with an “Aha!” as HEAT matched up with JAZZ, BUCKS, and NETS to make a set of NBA teams. Elsewhere on the board I saw HAIL was not there as a gesture or greeting, but was the proper partner for the wet-weather words. RACE CAR, which seemed to be an outlier—there were no other vehicles—turned out to be part of a set of palindromes.
How to win at Connections
As I discovered on my first play, the point isn’t to look for just any four-word grouping, but to try to discover the groupings that the puzzle makers had in mind. So don’t be too trigger-happy when you see your first possible connection. Look at the items you’ve identified; could any of them fit elsewhere?
It’s also strategic to mentally put a name to the thing your four potential matches have in common. The game’s help screen hints that the categories will never be as broad as “names” or “verbs,” so make sure you’ve pinned down something specific. Note that my initial guess was just “weather,” but the real grouping turned out to be “wet weather.” The game will name the theme after you correctly guess the grouping.
One Redditor suggests jotting down potential groupings on a piece of scratch paper, even if you end up with more or fewer than four words in each of those groups. Once you see them all written down, something might jump out at you.
I tried this on a Connections puzzle that had a bunch of words that might be cat names, and some religious words whose exact theme was unclear. The rest were a mystery to me. So I started writing down possible groups:
Cats: Sylvester, Chester, Felix, Garfield, Tom (Five? That’s too many.)
Religious words: altar, reliquary, abbey, temple, shrine (Again, too many!)
???: high
???: rocky
???: silk
Presidential first names: Grover, Calvin, Harry…and, wait, Chester!
As soon as I began writing that last group—the presidential first names—I realized that Chester could fit there too. Taking Chester off the cat list leaves me with only four cats, so I returned to my game board and guessed the presidents and then the cats. Both were correct.
All that was left to do was to figure out which of the religious words could fit with high, rocky, and silk. Those three are all (literal or metaphorical) roads, so their partner is Abbey Road. Get it?
