Wyna Liu is the brains behind the daily Connections puzzle and has shared what it is like to edit the viral sensation.
In a matter of months the word game became a true global sensation, giving its New York Times stablemate, Wordle, a run for its money in the popularity stakes.
“The response has been really incredible and overwhelming, and unexpected,” Liu told Newsweek in June. “It’s exciting that something I care very deeply about is resonating with people.”
Liu builds the seven daily games every week herself from ideas she sources through her daily life experiences. She keeps a tidy spreadsheet with a theme or word ideas, but a notebook is never far away for when inspiration strikes.
New York Times
“The game has evolved with the solvers, and responds to solvers’ experience and expectations,” she explained, pointing out how she now sometimes “clusters” words on the board together that may trick people into thinking they don’t belong together at all.
“Each board has to be made from scratch,” she said, explaining that when she sits down to build the week’s games, she’ll consult her notebook and spreadsheet, which is like a “digital sketchpad.”
“I usually don’t know where a board is going to go. It really does take a long time to fudge things and try different angles,” she said.
Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and the answers for Thursday’s puzzle are toward the end of the article, so scroll with caution.
How to Play ‘Connections’
The brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, one game linked the words “clear,” “earn,” “make” and “net,” which all came under the category “take home, as income.”
Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and then purple. However, the puzzles are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep things interesting.
The uniting themes can come from a broad range of categories—anything from Halloween costumes to music genres.
If all four words are correctly placed into each set, those words will be removed from the board. Each incorrect guess counts toward the mistake tally. Up to four errors can be made before it is game over.
Players can shuffle and rearrange the board if they want to try to make the process of guessing the connections easier. To make things a bit tougher, a word can sometimes belong to more than one category—but there is only one correct answer.
‘Connections’ #417 Clues for Thursday, August 1
Yellow: Action words to advocate for something.
Green: Relating to a tossing action.
Blue: You’ll find them in a Barnes & Noble.
Purple: Things you wear on your feet inside shoes.
‘Connections’ #417 Answer for Thursday, August 1
Yellow Category: PROMOTE
Yellow Words: Hype, market, pitch, sell
Green Category: THROW
Green Words: Cast, chuck, fling, hurl
Blue Category: BOOKSTORE SECTIONS
Blue Words: Fiction, humor, romance, travel
Purple Category: _____ SOCKS
Purple Words: Ankle, crew, sweat, tube
Did you guess the answers correctly? If so, congratulations. If you didn’t, there is no need to worry, as there will be another opportunity to crack Connections tomorrow. One of the best things about the puzzle is seeing if you can improve your score over time.
Connections is released at midnight in your local time zone and Newsweek will be back tomorrow with another round of hints and tips.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.