How to play NYT Connections

NYT Connections puts sixteen words in front of you, and they belong to four hidden groups of four. Each group shares something — a plain category, a sound, or a piece of wordplay — and you are allowed four mistakes for the whole puzzle, so a careless early guess can cost you the end of it.

The four groups are color-coded by difficulty: yellow is normally the gentlest and purple the hardest, with green and blue in between. Purple tends to run on wordplay rather than on meaning, and much of the game is resisting the obvious group the board is daring you to submit first.

The rules

1. Sixteen words sort into four groups of four.
2. Every group shares a connection: a category, a sound or a piece of wordplay.
3. You submit four words at a time and find out whether they form a group.
4. You are allowed four mistakes in the whole puzzle.
5. Each group carries a difficulty color, from yellow through green and blue to purple.

How a game goes, step by step

1. Read all sixteen words once before grouping anything, and mark the ones that could fit more than one idea. Those are the words the puzzle is built around.
2. Submit the group you are surest of, whatever color you expect it to be. Confidence is a better guide than difficulty, and each correct group shrinks what is left to reason about.
3. Make sure exactly four words, not five, are competing for a group before you submit it. A fifth plausible candidate is where a red herring is usually hiding.
4. When a set of four shares no real topic, look for a pattern instead of a meaning: a smaller word hidden inside each one, four words that sound like another set, or four that all pair with the same partner word.
5. Put a wrong guess to work. If you are told one word doesn't belong, the other three do share something, so define that connection more sharply and the odd one out will name itself.
6. Shuffle when your reasoning has stalled rather than sharpened. It doesn't change the groups, but it breaks up the visual clumps that make neighboring words look related.

Three tips for your first games

• Spend your mistakes on real toss-ups — a word you have narrowed to one of two groups, where the feedback decides it — not on a group you haven't reasoned through.
• Don't assume your easiest group is the yellow one. Plenty of solvers spot a purple wordplay pattern before they untangle an ambiguous yellow category.
• With one mistake left and two groups open, look again for wordplay in the harder-looking half before you submit anything at all.

Ready for more? Read the Connections strategy guide