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Why Connections rewards careful checking
Each Connections puzzle presents 16 words. Your task is to sort them into four groups of four, with one solution. The challenge is that a word may appear to fit more than one category, so an attractive pattern can be a decoy. The New York Times describes the categories as color-coded by difficulty: Yellow is easiest and Purple is trickiest. Editors curate the words and categories using the Oxford Dictionary. The NYT Help Center explains the game’s rules.
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That overlap is why it helps to treat a possible group as a hypothesis rather than an answer. Before you submit it, see whether the same rule accounts for all four words—and whether it leaves a workable set of words for the other groups.
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A spoiler-free routine for solving the board
1. Scan all 16 words first
Read the whole board before committing to the first tidy-looking set. Look for direct categories, shared phrases, alternate meanings, and possible wordplay. Keep more than one candidate pattern in mind when the evidence is ambiguous.
#1 Best Overall
2. Say the rule precisely
For each possible group, explain in one clear sentence what connects all four words. Check that the rule works in the same way for each tile. If you need an exception or have to switch meanings halfway through, the group may be a coincidence rather than the intended connection.
3. Test the other tiles for decoys
Ask whether a word outside your proposed group could also fit its category. Then look at the remaining tiles: can they still form three complete groups of four? A category that seems plausible for three words but leaves the fourth unexplained is not yet a defensible solution.
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4. Submit when the set holds together
Do not submit just because four words share a possible association. Submit when the rule fits all four and the rest of the board still makes sense. Connections is not described here as a speed contest; taking time to check a group is a practical way to avoid premature guesses, not a proven formula for winning.
5. Review the mistake, not just the answer
After the game, note what kind of connection you missed or what decoy pulled you in—such as a shared phrase, a second meaning, or a category that fit only three tiles. The aim is to recognize that pattern on another board, rather than memorize one day’s solution.
For eligible subscribers, the NYT Connections Bot can show difficulty, category solve order, common mistakes, guess-by-guess analysis, and personal ratings. The stats page includes win rate, streaks, perfect puzzles, and a mistake histogram. These tools can help you review how you approached a board; they do not replace solving it yourself.
Ways to practise without spoiling the daily puzzle
The daily game is free to play on supported platforms and releases at midnight in your timezone. Signing in is recommended if you want to retain progress across devices. If you want more practice after the daily board, the archive lets eligible players revisit past puzzles.
- Daily puzzle: Play the current board without hints or answer lookups, then review your own reasoning.
- Archive: The NYT says its archive goes back to June 12, 2023, and is available to All Access and Games subscribers. Archive play contributes to some stats but does not affect streaks.
- Review tools: Use the Bot and stats features, where available, to examine solve order and mistake patterns after you have made your own attempt.
Because archive access is subscription-based while the daily game is free, you can build the routine without an archive subscription; the archive is an optional route to more boards. See the NYT Help Center for current Connections access and feature details.
What the available study does—and does not—show
A paper by Angel Yahir Loredo Lopez, Tyler McDonald, and Ali Emami, dated December 2, 2024, frames Connections as a task in which obvious-seeming associations can produce incorrect groupings. Its example illustrates how three words can suggest a category while leaving a fourth word unaccounted for—one reason to check the whole board rather than stop at the first pattern. The paper describes a collection of 358 puzzles and evaluates 100 puzzles; in its no-hints condition, humans averaged 56%, while the best-performing model result reported for that condition was 45%. Those figures describe the study’s setup, not a general human success rate: it used three human evaluators, and the authors identify the small sample as a limitation. Read the paper and its methods.
The study supports the value of deliberate checking as a way to approach the puzzle, but it does not establish that this particular routine will improve any one player’s results. Track your own mistakes over time if you want to see whether a habit—such as testing all four words before submitting—helps you.
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