After Wordle, Connections is the second most popular New York Times brainteaser. It was created bycrossword editor Wyna Liu in 2023 and born out of a brainstorming session to create new games and puzzles for the publication.
Every week, Liu uses ideas from her everyday experiences to build the game. While she does have an official spreadsheet for all her word and category ideas, she also carries a notebook that she uses to jot down inspiration when it strikes.
"Each board has to be made from scratch," Liu told Newsweek in an exclusive interview. She added that, when she sits down to build the week's games, she consults her notebook and spreadsheet, which acts like a "digital sketchpad."
How to Play 'Connections?'
In Connections, players are given a 16-word table. From there, they must then categorize the words into four common theme categories. For example, yesterday's Connections linked the words "Bat," "Pumpkin," "Spider" and "Witch" under "Halloween Symbols."
Players can make only four wrong guesses before they lose the game.
In her Newsweek interview, Liu shared some hints to help players win at Connections.
"My best piece advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing," said Liu. "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," which would ultimately waste a turn.
By trying your hand at finding another category first, it is likely to remove the words that could belong to more than one group, ultimately meaning there is less chance to commit an error, because "your four guesses go by extremely quickly."