Sixteen words sit in a grid and belong to four secret categories — the difficulty is that several words fit more than one.
Publisher
The New York Times
Cost
Free, with a New York Times account
How often
One puzzle a day
Time
5–10 minutes
The rules
Sixteen words are shown; find the four groups of four.
Select four words and submit them as a group.
A wrong group costs one of your four mistakes.
Groups are colour-coded by difficulty once solved: yellow easiest, then green, blue, purple hardest.
The purple group is usually a wordplay trick rather than a topic.
What works
Genuinely harder than Wordle, and harder in an interesting way
The overlapping words are a deliberate trap, which makes solving satisfying
Four mistakes gives room to test a theory without ending the game
The purple category rewards lateral thinking rather than vocabulary
What doesn’t
Category logic is sometimes arguable, which produces genuine frustration
Occasionally leans on American pop culture that does not travel
One wrong guess early can cascade into losing on a puzzle you understood
No partial credit — three correct groups and a miss still reads as a loss
Skip Connections if: Anyone who wants a quick win before coffee, or who finds ambiguous categorisation annoying rather than fun
Questions about Connections
How many mistakes can you make in Connections?
Four. The fifth incorrect group ends the puzzle, and the solution is revealed.
What do the Connections colours mean?
They rank difficulty rather than topic: yellow is the most straightforward group, then green, then blue, with purple the hardest — usually a wordplay or hidden-pattern category rather than a subject.
Why is the purple group so hard in Connections?
Because it is typically not a topic at all. Purple groups tend to be things like words that become new words with a letter added, or terms hiding another word inside them.
Is Connections harder than Wordle?
For most players yes. Wordle has one answer and mechanical feedback; Connections requires spotting a categorisation where several words are deliberately placed to fit the wrong group.
Meldle is a different daily puzzle — four words sharing one missing pair of letters. Try today’s → It’s free, needs no account, and here is what it does badly.
