A connections game drawn from tech Twitter, printed fresh every morning

The connections game in TechTwitter IO's Fun & Games page hands you sixteen words and asks you to sort them into four groups of four. It is free, it needs no account, and its categories come out of the same week of launches, outages and feuds that the rest of the paper makes fun of.

If you already play NYT Connections, you know the rules. What changes is the material: one group might be AI model names, the next one might be the folders in your inbox.

How to play the board

Open today's paper and turn to K1, the Fun & Games page. Connections sits between Twordle and Jumble.

• Tap a tile to pick it. You can hold four at a time.
• Press Submit once you have four. A right answer locks the group in and prints its name above the grid.
• Shuffle moves the remaining tiles around, which helps when your eye keeps pairing the same neighbours.
• Deselect drops your current picks without costing anything.

You have four mistakes, shown as a row of dots under the board. When three of your four tiles belong together, the board tells you that you are one away. A guess that misses by more just gets a flat no. Spend all four mistakes and the game lays out every group so you can see what you missed. Clear the whole grid and the paper says you understood the discourse.

What the groups look like

The appeal is the mix of timeline references and ordinary words. The 2 November board, printed in the next morning's answers box, had these four groups:

You can get two of those from general knowledge. The other two reward having scrolled tech Twitter that week. That balance is deliberate: a reader who follows AI news has an edge, but nobody is shut out. Tiles are not always single words either. A board in October used SQUAD BUSTERS and GOG GALAXY as tiles, in groups about Supercell games and PC game launchers.

Today's grid follows the same pattern. Without giving anything away, it puts words you would find in a kitchen next to words from the morning's lead story about a laser maker.

Missed a day

Old editions stay up. The Morgue lists every back issue by date, starting on 8 October 2026, and each one carries its own Connections board, still playable. The edition date box at the top of the paper does the same job when you know the day you want, and the end of the Fun & Games page links back one day.

One warning before you start today's grid: the box at the bottom of the page prints yesterday's solutions. It sits behind a "No peeking" switch, so leave it alone until you are done.

TechTwitter IO or NYT Connections

The New York Times' Connections is the better choice if you want a carefully edited general-knowledge puzzle, difficulty colours that run from straightforward to tricky, and stats and streaks saved to an account.

TechTwitter IO is the better choice if the timeline is where you spend your mornings. The board reads like the week on X, it costs nothing, and four more puzzles share the page, so one tab covers the whole coffee break.

A note on the paper

The puzzles are straight puzzles, but the newspaper around them is satire, and it says so in its footer: unless a post links to its source, the people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. Read the headlines for the jokes and play the grid for the groups. Signing in is optional and only gets you a ping when the next edition is out.