Connections is the most-played game on our hub of daily and semantic word games, and the only one on it made by a newspaper. Wyna Liu launched it for The New York Times in June 2023; it now runs second only to Wordle in the Times’ games app. It has nothing to do with letter guessing and everything to do with how meanings overlap — which is why it pairs so well with Contexto’s daily ranked puzzle and why players who are good at one tend to be good at the other.
Today’s Connections answer
We do not republish the New York Times’ daily groupings. They are the Times’ puzzle and their editorial, and reposting them each morning is precisely the kind of scraped-answer page that adds nothing to the web.
The game reveals them itself:
- Four mistakes ends the round and shows all four groups, colour-coded by difficulty.
- Solving it shows the same, with the category names.
- The Times publishes the full archive for subscribers, so past grids are recoverable.
If you are mid-grid and stuck, the shuffle button and the purple-group tactic below are worth more than a spoiler. For a puzzle whose answer we do publish, Contexto’s daily word is on the answer page with hints ahead of it.
What Connections is
You are shown a 4×4 grid of sixteen words. Hidden inside it are four groups of four that share a category. Your job is to find all four groups. You get four mistakes; a fifth ends the round.
The difficulty is entirely in the overlap. A well-made Connections grid is built so that several words appear to belong to more than one group, and the correct partition is only visible once you have worked out which reading the editor intended. A grid containing BASS, FLOUNDER, SOLE and PIKE looks like a fish group until you notice that SOLE, HEEL, TOE and ARCH are parts of a foot, and one of the four fish has to move.
How to play
- Read all sixteen words before touching anything. The first pattern you see is usually the trap.
- Look for the group with the least ambiguity — often the most technical or specific one — and submit that first. Removing four words shrinks the puzzle disproportionately.
- Count candidates. If you can see five plausible members of a category, one of them belongs somewhere else; find where, and you have often solved two groups at once.
- Use “one away” feedback carefully. It tells you three of your four are right, but not which three.
- Shuffle when stuck. Re-randomising the grid genuinely breaks the visual grouping your eye has locked onto.
Rounds reset at midnight Eastern time, and the Times publishes a full archive for subscribers.
Reading the difficulty colours
After you solve a group, it is revealed in one of four colours, and those colours are ranked:
- Yellow — the most straightforward category. Usually a plain semantic set: types of tree, words for “happy”.
- Green — still direct, but narrower.
- Blue — needs a step of inference: things a specific person did, items in a named work.
- Purple — the wordplay group. Homophones, hidden words, ”___ + a letter”, anagram families. Purple almost never means what the words mean.
The single most useful tactic in the game is to look for purple first even though you solve it last. If you can identify that four words are connected by form rather than meaning, the remaining twelve become a much easier problem. This is the exact inverse of Contexto, where form never matters and only meaning does — as the ranking guide explains, Contexto’s model has no idea how a word is spelled.
Connections vs Contexto
| Contexto | Connections | |
|---|---|---|
| Failure | Impossible — unlimited guesses | Four mistakes and you’re out |
| Feedback | Numeric rank on every guess | Right, wrong, or “one away” |
| Skill | Following a semantic gradient | Partitioning an ambiguous set |
| Wordplay | Never relevant | Often the hardest group |
| Session length | 10–20 minutes | 3–6 minutes |
The two games train opposite halves of the same muscle. Contexto asks what is near this word, and rewards you for generating a wide field of related vocabulary quickly. Connections asks which of these near-things belong together, and punishes you for accepting the first grouping that fits. Playing Connections regularly makes you noticeably better at the category-sweeping method in our Contexto strategy guide, because it trains you to hold several competing categorisations open at once instead of committing to the first.
If you enjoy the pressure of a mistake limit, Connections is the better daily. If you would rather have a puzzle you cannot lose, today’s Contexto board is unlimited and has a built-in hint system.
Where to go next
Wordle is the game Connections shares an app with, and the one whose six-guess limit set the template for daily puzzle pacing. For proximity feedback rendered visually instead of numerically, Globle applies the warmer/colder idea to countries and takes about five minutes.
Nine more daily games — including Quordle, Waffle and Squardle — are compared on the games like Contexto hub.