Connections was invented by games masters at The New York Times who were tasked with coming up with a new daily puzzle for the newspaper’s website.
They put their brains together in an annual brainstorming session and Connections was born in 2021.
The daily task of editing the hit puzzle is the job of Wyna Liu who revealed to Newsweek how she comes up with four new categories every day.
She builds the seven daily games every week herself from ideas she sources through daily life experiences. To stay organized with her inspiration, Liu keep a tidy spreadsheet with her theme or word ideas, but a notebook is never far away for when inspiration may hit her.
“Each board has to be made from scratch,” she said, explaining that when she sits down to the 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 a long time to fudge things and try different angles.”
New York Times
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.”
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.
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’ #431 Clues for Thursday, August 15
Newsweek is here with some hints to help you identify today’s Connections categories.
Yellow: These words mean span.
Green: These could mean spouse.
Blue: Casual names for some popular ales.
Purple: Words that follow another three-letter word that begins with ‘p’.
‘Connections’ #431 Answers for Thursday, August 15
Yellow Category: BREADTH
Yellow Words: Extent, Range, Reach, Scope
Green Category: OTHER HALF
Green Words: Complement, Match, Mate, Partner
Blue Category: BEERS, FAMILIARLY
Blue Words: Bud, Natty, Sierra, Stella
Purple Category: WORDS AFTER “PAY”
Purple Words: Check, Dirt, Pal, Phone
Well, that was good fun! Did you work out the answer? If so, congratulations, but please don’t be put off playing if not. Practice makes perfect, and the next Connections puzzle will be published on Friday.
Connections is released at midnight in your local time zone, and Newsweek will be back tomorrow with another round of hints and tips.
If you can’t wait, why not try these other popular online word puzzle games?