Connections Game Rules, Groups, Mistakes

DataForSEO Labs recorded about 823,000 monthly searches for connections game in the October 1, 2026 sample, with a keyword difficulty of 53. The search is informational: people want the rules and a board they can play. Play the current practice set on the Connections NYT board.

“Connections is a daily game about finding common threads between words.”

Wyna Liu, The New York Times, June 26, 2023

The turn

Tap four words. Submit is available only when four are selected. Deselect clears the pick. Shuffle reorders the words that are still loose. A correct group leaves the grid, takes its color, and prints the category above the remaining tiles. The practice day changes at midnight in New York, the same clock the Times uses for its daily puzzle.

A wrong group costs one mistake. Four filled dots ends the board. If you repeat a wrong set, the board says already guessed and does not spend another mistake. If three of the four belong together, it says one away, and the mistake still counts.

What the colors mean

The New York Times Company described the colors in its August 28, 2023 announcement: yellow is the most straightforward group, and purple is the trickiest, with green and blue between them. That order is a solving tool. Lock yellow before you invent a clever rule for a word that simply names a dog or a season.

On the official puzzle, Liu builds one board a day. On this site each dated URL is a practice board with the same limits, written so the purple group has a specific trick: a homophone, a double letter, a film title, a unit named after a person. The hint method explains how far a nudge should go.

Win, loss, and the share grid

Solve all four groups and the board reports Perfect when no mistakes were used, or Solved when at least one guess missed. The share text is four color squares in the order you found the groups. A loss reveals the groups you had not found and marks the result Revealed.

Progress for each board is stored in this browser under a key that starts with connections-desk. Play again clears that board. Nothing is sent to an account, because there is no account. Details are on the privacy page.

Official puzzle and practice boards

The Times hosts the daily game, the sports edition, and the archive of its own puzzles. This desk does not republish those boards. If you need the official grid, use New York Times Connections. If you want extra reps on the format, stay on the practice board, then open today's practice answers only after you have used the hints.

Two neighboring Times games get confused with this one in search. Strands is a theme word search with a spangram, covered on the Strands comparison. The sports practice grid is a Connections board whose categories all sit inside sports, not a different ruleset.