Mastering the Move: The Key to Unraveling the Mysteries of NYT CONNECTIONS

The New York Times has created another brain-teasing word puzzle, the spin-off to Wordle, now known as CONNECTIONS, which is becoming as popular as Wordle. The first thing you need to learn to play, or improve at playing, is the move. In this article, you’ll learn how to play, some tips to help you win, and then the move that can make you a better puzzle player.

How to Play CONNECTIONS: The Fundamentals

At its simplest, CONNECTIONS is a deceptively elemental but terrifyingly tricky word game. Each of the 16 words must be separated into four groups, joined by invisible threads that can connect them along any number of possible paths, from the spectrum through to the literary sequel. The first step is learning to look: not at the word but behind it, for what holds these together.

But all moves are not created equal. Candidly, still, the game holds much of its own back, tempting you with words that straddle categories and yet requiring that you embark on the move that declares the place. Moving, shunting and gathering, the colour codes emerge — yellow for obvious, green to blue, blue to purple for the increasingly arcane.

Strategy Is Your Best MOVE

This is not merely a tactic, but an arsenal – each correct group you submit reveals some of the hidden design, and the mistakes, happy ones, are instructive, if infrequent. The tactical move is to begin with the most obvious symmetries, in some cases marked with yellow.

Today’s MOVE: Hints to Drive Your Strategy

It teases without giving away the solution, and as always, it presents its own challenges and rewards. The themes are carefully selected such that you will pause, think and then move with purpose. If you are close to discovering the first group but lack that extra bit of momentum, then pay special attention to those outlier words, as they are often key to the solution.

Moving Past Today’s Puzzle

If today’s puzzle seems just too daunting, that’s OK. CONNECTIONS is in the business of daily resets. Yesterday’s puzzles can be bypassed, and new lexical frontiers conquered. And even when that puzzle seems invulnerable, we have daily hints and themes to help propel you toward that coveted answer.

Editors' MOVE: A Selection of Puzzle Recommendations

If you’re good at the CONNECTIONS flat-puzzle, you may want a more demanding daily challenge. The NYT editors suggest you add a quick lexical exercise with their NYT Mini Crossword, followed by a check of your Wordle answer and the answers for the NYT Spelling Bee for a complete brain workout.

Mastering the MOVE in CONNECTIONS

Nor is mastering the move in CONNECTIONS really about right answers but about learning patience, developing tactics and being attentive to patterns. Every day brings you a different set of words, a new puzzle, and a new possibility for using trial and error to refine your particular set of puzzle moves.

The Essence of 'MOVE' in CONNECTIONS

The move is more than a move in CONNECTIONS; it’s the choices players make about solving a puzzle, and the ones they make while solving it – a ripple of analytical thought upon an initial surge of observation. It might be rearranging the blocks, deciding when to submit a group, or choosing not to play the puzzle at all. This is one reason that a ‘session’ doesn’t just happen to you with CONNECTIONS; it’s a confrontation with words and logic in a different state each time.

All in all, to master the move in CONNECTIONS is to enjoy the exhilaration of discovery coupled with the rich rewards of intellectual victory. To tackle it daily, to feel the heat of competition as you make one correct move, two, three, four, to whittle down the puzzle to a manageable size, to find the last, key one and open the locks – all of this is to become sharper, quicker in your perception of patterns and possibilities throughout the day. Jump on to CONNECTIONS where in every word, in every category and in every move you will become more knowledgeable and more able to appreciate the wonderful complexities of our interconnected language world.