About This Connections Practice Desk
Connections Desk writes practice boards with 16 words, four groups, and four mistakes. The New York Times publishes the official daily puzzle. These are not the same words.
The Connections format comes from New York Times Games. Wyna Liu edits the official boards. The beta opened on June 12, 2023, and the game joined the Times apps on August 28, 2023. Liu's June 26, 2023 essay in the Times is the clearest public description of the rules: four groups, four mistakes, common threads between words.
This site exists for the searches around that game: how a hint should be worded, what the colors mean, how Strands differs, and extra grids to practice on. Search volumes cited on the guides come from a DataForSEO Labs pull on October 1, 2026. They describe demand. They are not a claim about this site's traffic.
Play the current board on the home page, or open the official game at nytimes.com/games/connections.