Connections hands you sixteen words and one job: sort them into four groups of four that share something. It sounds like a tidy filing task. Then you notice that six of the words could be fish, and the puzzle starts to feel less like filing and more like a cabinet that bites.
This guide covers how the game works, the kinds of categories it uses, and a method for working through a board without burning your mistakes. There are no answers here, only habits that work on any day's puzzle. Every example board below is made up for this guide.
How the game works
- The board shows sixteen words. Your goal is four groups of four.
- You pick four words and press Submit. If they form a group, they lock in and leave the board.
- You get four mistakes. On the fourth wrong guess, the game ends.
- If three of your four words belong together, the game tells you that you are one away.
- Groups have a color that hints at difficulty: yellow is usually the most straightforward, then green, then blue, and purple is the trickiest.
- Shuffle rearranges the board. It changes nothing about the answer, but it can change what you see.
The categories you will meet
Most groups fall into a handful of families. Naming the family is half of solving the group.
- Plain meaning. Words that mean nearly the same thing, or belong to the same set: kinds of fish, parts of a car, shades of blue.
- Fill in the blank. Each word fits the same missing piece: FLY, WORK, PLACE and MAN all follow FIRE.
- Hidden words. Each word hides a smaller word inside it, like a body part, a color or an animal.
- Sound-alikes and spelling tricks. Homophones, words that become other words when you add or drop a letter, or words that read differently backward.
- Things that share a role. Famous people with the same first name, items in a certain kind of kit, words that come before or after the same thing.
Purple is usually the wordplay group. If a set of words makes no sense by meaning, test it for hidden words, sounds and spelling before you try anything else.
Red herrings, and how to spot them
The puzzle's main trick is overlap. Imagine a made-up board that includes BASS, SOLE, PIKE, CARP and PERCH, plus DRUM, HORN and HARP. That is five fish, and BASS is also an instrument. The instruments need BASS to make four, so the fish group must be SOLE, PIKE, CARP and PERCH. Submit the first four fish you spot and there is a good chance you grab BASS and lose a mistake.
The tell is a count. When five or more words fit a category, at least one of them belongs somewhere else. Do not submit that group yet. Instead, ask which of the five also fits another category on the board, and set it aside.
A quick way to keep track:
- Write or think of every category you can see, even half-formed ones.
- Next to each, count the words that could fit.
- Any category with exactly four clear candidates is a strong first guess.
- Any category with five or more candidates is a trap until you resolve the extra word.
An order of attack
Scan before you tap. Read all sixteen words once before selecting anything. The first group you notice is often the one the puzzle wanted you to notice, which is exactly why it might be a decoy.
Solve the cleanest group first, not the easiest-looking one. The best first guess is the group with exactly four candidates and no overlap, whatever its color. Removing four words shrinks the board and makes the overlaps easier to see.
Leave the leftovers for last. Once two or three groups are locked in, the last group often solves itself. If the final four words seem unrelated, that is a purple group, and the connection is almost always wordplay.
Use Shuffle when you are stuck. The starting layout groups words in ways that suggest false pairs. Shuffling breaks those pairings and often makes a real connection jump out.
Making the most of your four mistakes
Mistakes are information, not only penalties.
- "One away" is a gift. It tells you three of your four are right. Swap one word, ideally the one you were least sure of, rather than starting over.
- Never guess two different groups from the same pile of five. If five words fit and you are unsure which is the stray, spend your thinking time, not a guess.
- Save your last mistake for the last group. By the end, the board is small enough that a careful look usually beats a guess.
When a word is unfamiliar
Connections loves words with more than one meaning, and some of those meanings are obscure. If a word refuses to fit anywhere, look it up: its second or third meaning is often the one the puzzle is using. The JumbleFix dictionary lists every sense of a word, which is useful for exactly this kind of check. For anagram categories, the anagram solver shows every word a set of letters can spell.
A short checklist
- Read all sixteen words.
- List the categories you can see and count the candidates for each.
- Submit a group with exactly four candidates first.
- Treat any five-candidate category as a trap until the stray is found.
- Test leftovers for hidden words, sounds and spelling.
- Use "one away" to swap a single word, not to restart.
Keep these habits and the cabinet stops biting. Mostly.
Written by Morty Leonid with AI assistance. Example boards are invented for this guide.