Connections

About Connections

Inspired by the New York Times Connections puzzle launched in 2023, this word grouping game quickly became one of the most popular daily brain teasers on the internet. Players must sort 16 words into four groups of four based on hidden connections. The puzzle tests lateral thinking, vocabulary knowledge, and the ability to spot non-obvious patterns. Categories range from straightforward groupings like colors or animals to tricky wordplay, double meanings, and cultural references. PlayBrain's version offers a fresh daily puzzle plus unlimited random mode so you never run out of challenges.

How to play

1. Select four words that you believe share a hidden connection, then submit your group.
2. If correct, the group is revealed with its color. Yellow is easiest, purple is hardest.
3. You get four mistakes before the game ends, so choose carefully.
4. Look for the trickiest connections first to avoid falling into traps set by misleading overlaps.

What the colours actually mean

The four groups are ranked by how hard the connection is to see, not by how obscure the words are. Yellow is usually a plain category: four dogs, four colours, four fruits. Green is a category with a small twist. Blue often needs specific knowledge, such as characters from one film or brands in one industry. Purple is nearly always wordplay: homophones, hidden words, things that precede or follow a common term, or words that become new words when a letter is added. Knowing this ordering is itself a strategy, because if a grouping feels too easy for purple, it is not the purple group.

Strategy

Solve purple first, not yellow. This feels backwards and it is the single biggest improvement most players can make. The puzzle is built so that several words fit the obvious yellow category, and some of them are traps belonging elsewhere. If you find the wordplay group first, you remove four words from the board and the remaining categories usually collapse on their own.

Count candidates before submitting. If you can name five or six words that fit your category, you have found the trap, not the group. A correct group has exactly four members. When you have five candidates, the right move is to work out which one belongs to a different category, and that question is usually easier than the category itself.

Look for the odd part of speech. Setters hide groups by mixing words that read naturally as nouns but function as verbs, or vice versa. If three words are obviously nouns and a fourth sits oddly, that fourth word is often the key to a completely different group.

Treat "one away" as information, not failure. One away tells you three of your four are correct and the category is real. Do not rebuild from scratch. Swap the single word you were least confident about and resubmit. Players who panic and rearrange all four burn a second mistake for no new information.

Common mistakes

• Submitting the first plausible group you see. That is exactly the guess the puzzle is designed to punish.
• Ignoring that every word belongs to precisely one group. If a word fits two categories, one of them is wrong.
• Reading only for meaning. Purple groups often depend on how a word is spelled or sounds, not what it means.
• Spending all four mistakes on the same category instead of switching to a group you can see clearly.

A worked example

Suppose the grid contains BASS, SOLE, PIKE, PERCH, DRUM, SNARE, TOM and CRASH. Reading for meaning, the fish jump out: BASS, SOLE, PIKE, PERCH. But that is five candidates once you notice DRUM is also a fish. The drums are SNARE, TOM, CRASH and either BASS or DRUM. Now the constraint does the work: BASS is a drum, DRUM is not one of the four percussion names, so the drum group is BASS, SNARE, TOM, CRASH, and the fish are SOLE, PIKE, PERCH, DRUM. The obvious reading of both categories was wrong, and counting candidates is what exposed it.

More grouping and word puzzles

For more category-based puzzles, try Word Categories or Word Association. For a hidden-word grid, try Word Strands. For letter tracing, try Boggle or the coverage puzzle Side Words.