Discover The Exciting World Of Connections: The New York Times' Puzzle Game

You might be familiar with its famous big brother Wordle, but make sure you check out Connections too. After Wordle, Connections is The New York Times' second most popular game. It was developed in 2023 by puzzle editor Wyna Liu.

The game works by giving players 16 different words. The challenge is then to put these into four groups of four by way of a category that connects them. Each of the four categories is color-coded by difficulty, with the yellow category being the easiest and purple the hardest. The green and blue categories are medium-difficulty.

Connections stock image — A woman smiles while looking at her cellphone. Newsweek has some hints to help you solve today’s "Connections" puzzle.Sonja Pacho/Getty Images

Liu gets the ideas for Connections from her everyday experiences, using a notebook to jot down ideas as they come to her and then ultimately uploading them into an official spreadsheet. In an interview with Slate, Liu said: “The process is I have a notebook where I keep down category ideas. And when I sit down to make boards, I’ll take one of those ideas, I’ll take those words, and then I’ll start spinning off them. And then the boards will be built from that, and sometimes it goes in surprising directions.”

Liu added that one of the most “joyful” things about creating the game is she doesn’t know what the categories are going to be when she begins with the “seed” of an idea. This element of surprise keeps the game fresh and engaging for players.

Strategies for Mastering Connections

Well, according to Liu, who sat down with Newsweek earlier this year, don’t follow her lead and take a “rage solve” approach. Instead, Liu advises waiting as long as you can before guessing a category. “My best piece advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing,” she said.

“You may see the board and have completely identified the category, seeing five words that could belong in that category. Don’t try to guess the four words in that category, because even though you know what the fifth member is, you won’t know which of the four it might not be.” Doing so would waste one of your goes, of which there are only four. The four guesses, Liu said, do go by “extremely quickly.”