What a connections puzzle is, and where to play one today

A connections puzzle is a word game with sixteen tiles that hide four groups of four, and your job is to find what each group has in common. The best free place to play one today is the daily board in TechTwitter IO, with the New York Times' Connections as the well-known original.

The catch that makes it hard: several words look like they belong in more than one group, and only one way of splitting the grid is right.

The rules, short version

1. You see sixteen words in a grid.
2. Select four you think share something, then submit.
3. A right group locks in. A wrong one costs you a mistake. TechTwitter IO gives you four before it reveals the answers.
4. If three of your four were right, both TechTwitter IO and NYT tell you that you were one away.
5. Every puzzle has exactly one solution, so a word that fits two groups is a trap, not a bonus.

What counts as a category

The New York Times says its categories are always more specific than "5-letter words", "names" or "verbs". In practice, groups tend to fall into a few kinds:

• A shared set. NYT's own help screen uses fish: bass, flounder, salmon, trout.
• A missing word. Its other example is fire: ant, drill, island and opal all follow it.
• Sound or spelling tricks. Words that sound like something else, or hide a smaller word.
• Insider knowledge. This is where boards differ most. NYT leans on general knowledge. TechTwitter IO uses the week's tech news, so a recent board grouped LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH and MAX as effort levels, next to a plain group of email folders.

Try a sample board

Here is a small grid we wrote for this page. Four groups, one solution.

Five words could be snakes, five could be coffee and five could be gems. The way in is SWIFT, the one tile that can only be a programming language. Once you read it that way, PYTHON, JAVA and RUBY join it, and the other three groups fall out on their own.

Answer: languages (PYTHON, JAVA, RUBY, SWIFT), snakes (COBRA, VIPER, ADDER, MAMBA), coffee (MOCHA, LATTE, ESPRESSO, CORTADO), gems (OPAL, PEARL, JADE, EMERALD). PEARL was the decoy for anyone thinking of Perl.

Where to play a connections puzzle today

TechTwitter IO, our pick. A free satirical daily paper about tech Twitter. Its Fun & Games page prints a fresh board every morning, with Submit, Shuffle and Deselect buttons and four mistakes. You need no account, and past boards stay playable in the Morgue, its list of back issues. The paper itself is parody, as its footer says, but the puzzles are real puzzles.

NYT Connections. The daily puzzle edited by Wyna Liu. Groups carry a difficulty colour revealed as you solve, from straightforward to tricky, and a free account keeps your stats and streaks. Choose it over TechTwitter IO if you do not follow tech news, since its categories assume nothing about your timeline.

PuzzGrid. For more after that, PuzzGrid hosts thousands of user-made grids inspired by the connecting walls on the quiz show Only Connect, with a grid of the day and a difficulty filter up to Fiendish.

A quick way to start any board

Read all sixteen words before you touch one. Look for the group that has exactly four candidates, like the languages above, and solve it first. Save the obvious-looking group for last, since that is usually where the decoys sit.