NYT Games Connections: How to Play, Step by Step

NYT Games Connections gives you a grid of 16 words and asks you to sort them into four hidden groups of four, each sharing a category you have to figure out yourself. You get four mistakes before the puzzle ends. That's the whole premise — the difficulty comes entirely from words that plausibly fit more than one group. If you want a free daily version of exactly this mechanic, Categories works the same way with no subscription.

The rules of Connections

1. 1You're shown 16 words or short phrases in a 4x4 grid.
2. 2Your job is to select four words you believe share a category, then submit that guess.
3. 3A correct guess locks that row of four into place, color-coded by difficulty.
4. 4An incorrect guess counts as one mistake, and you're allowed four mistakes before the puzzle ends unsolved.
5. 5The puzzle is solved once all four groups are correctly identified.

There's no time limit, and you can rearrange or reselect your guess as many times as you like before submitting it.

The four colour-coded difficulty groups

Every Connections puzzle has exactly four categories, ranked from easiest to hardest and color-coded once solved:

• Yellow — straightforward. The most literal, obvious grouping, usually a direct category like "types of pasta."
• Green — mildly tricky. Still fairly direct, but with one or two words that could plausibly belong elsewhere.
• Blue — genuinely tricky. Often relies on a less common meaning of a word or a wordplay twist rather than the obvious definition.
• Purple — hardest. Frequently wordplay-based: words that share a hidden word, a homophone, or fit a pattern like "___ + a common suffix."

The color difficulty is only revealed after you solve a group, so part of the challenge is guessing which category a set of words belongs to before you know how tricky it's meant to be.

Why Connections is harder than it looks

The entire design of Connections hinges on overlap bait — words that seem to obviously belong to one category but actually belong to another. A word like "SPRING" could be a season, a coiled metal object, or a verb meaning to jump, and the puzzle deliberately exploits that ambiguity to trip you up on your first guess.

This is also why the purple category is usually solved last, not first: it often reuses words that look like an easy fit for yellow or green, and only makes sense once the more obvious groups have been correctly removed from the board.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Locking in your first idea too fast. If four words seem to fit a category perfectly and easily, double-check whether one of them fits a stranger category even better.
• Ignoring words that don't obviously fit anywhere. Those often belong to the purple wordplay category, which rarely has an obvious surface-level connection.
• Submitting a guess with only three confirmed matches. Guessing to "see what happens" burns one of your four mistakes; it's usually better to solve a category you're fully sure of first and use the newly reduced grid to reason about the rest.
• Overlooking double meanings. Many categories hinge on a secondary definition of a common word rather than its most obvious meaning.

A practical solving order

1. 1Scan the full grid and note any words that seem to belong to more than one plausible group.
2. 2Solve the category you're most confident about first, even if it's not the yellow one — locking in any correct group reduces the noise.
3. 3Re-scan the remaining 12 words once a group is removed; groupings often become clearer with fewer words on the board.
4. 4Save purple for last, and specifically look for wordplay patterns — shared prefixes, hidden smaller words, or homophones — among whatever's left.

Connections within the NYT Games lineup

Connections is one of the four free daily titles in NYT Games, alongside Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword. For the full catalogue and which games actually cost money, what are NYT games and are NYT games free cover the details.

A free version to practice on

If you want to sharpen your Connections instincts — or you've already burned today's four mistakes — Categories is a free, daily grouping puzzle built on the exact same mechanic: 16 items, four hidden groups, four mistakes allowed. We've also compared several similar options directly in games similar to NYT Connections if you want more than one alternative to rotate through.

The bottom line

NYT Games Connections is a deceptively simple grid that rewards patience over speed: resist your first instinct on ambiguous words, solve your most confident group first, and save wordplay-heavy purple categories for last. Once you've got the hang of it, today's daily challenge has a fresh grouping puzzle waiting, and the leaderboard tracks how your solving streak compares.