How to play Connections, the new game set to dethrone Wordle

It’s been a little more than a year and a half since Wordle burst into the collective conscience thanks to the ability for players to post their performance on Twitter. The New York Times quickly acquired the game created by Brooklyn-based software engineer Josh Wardle to add to the newspaper’s portfolio of games.

The Games division didn’t sit on their laurels though with that breakout success. Over the past year the team has been working on its latest game according to head of Games at the Times, Jonathan Knight, speaking to CNN. The beta version has already garnered a legion of weekly players in the millions since being launched in June.

The new game ‘Connections’ is now available on the NYT Games app for iOS and Android devices. So how does one play this new game?

How to play Connections, the new game set to dethrone Wordle

The concept of the game is simple, players are given sixteen words which they must group into four groups of four, finding the thread between the various words presented. They have four opportunities to get it right before it ‘game over’ until the next challenge is available, new ones will drop daily.

The Connections instructions advise players to “carefully consider their choices and connections.” First read and “take your time to understand the words” provided each day. “Think about what [each word] means” in connection to the other words provided.

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the words, if you need help “feel free to use Google or other resources,” look for a common theme that connect them. Once you think that you’ve found the connections, make your selection and then submit your answer by clicking the submit button.

Things aren’t always as they appear in Connections

One of the people credited with helping to create the game, New York Times’ associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu, wrote in an article that “rather than the literal meanings of the words on the cards… some categories might be defined by their use of wordplay.” These include palindromes, homophones, adding or dropping letters and words.

When coming up with the idea for the game she “thought back on the Games magazine anthologies that my mom got for me when I was a child.” One set that stood out for her were those of cartoonist and puzzle maker, Robert Leighton.

“With the help of an answer key, I learned from his puzzles that a drawing of a tick, a thumbtack and a tow truck could be used to express the term ‘tic-tac-toe,’” she says. Similarly, she discovered visual puns by matching a telephone with a diamond ring as in the sound a phone makes. Another example is “a bursting balloon could be paired with a soda can, since both go ‘POP!’”

“Thinking about these puzzles reminded me of how meaning can be communicated succinctly,” Liu wrote. “I was inspired by their playfulness and use of free association.”