Connections

What is Connections?

Connections is a daily word puzzle from the New York Times.

You are given a grid of sixteen words and asked to group them into four sets based on shared connections.

Each set has a unifying theme, which can range from very straightforward to very obscure.

Thoughts on gameplay

Connections exercises multiple parts of your brain. To win, you need to consider spelling, word sounds, word meaning, trivia, and more.

The game also rewards restraint. Strong play involves holding multiple possible sets in mind, and then deliberately testing those hypotheses.

What makes it fun

Connections is fun because the puzzles cleverly test multiple things at once: word sounds, meanings, trivia, etc. It's also a very pretty game, visually.

In my opinion, the best way to play (especially if you're experienced) is the "reverse difficulty solve." To do that, you need to solve from the hardest set first to the easiest, in order: purple, then blue, then green, then yellow.

That requires solving the whole puzzle but also correctly assessing the difficulty of each set. Played this way, I find the game to be extremely fun and challenging.

John