The "Connections" game by New York Times puzzles has garnered attention from all word enthusiasts around the globe.
Like Wordle, it enables one to think more critically and see patterns, stimulating the participants' brains and cognitive abilities. However, unlike Wordle where one looks for a correct word or definition, in this game, the player has to group four words under common themes or associations.
Today's solution, from October 17, 2024, was no exception. Here are the hints, solutions for today as well as tips for beginners on how the game works:
For first-time players, Connections consists of a 16-word grid puzzle. The challenge is to discover connections among words and sort them into four separate groups, where each group has four words and one correct answer. That sounds easy enough, except that the problem is that there are so many ways words can be alike that you might easily fall into an incorrect grouping. The game also has only four mistakes allowed per puzzle, once those have been made, the game is over and will just restart.
The game offers a colour-coded system to help players with difficulty levels:
Yellow: Tends to be the group most easily solved.
Green: Difficult, moderately challenging
Blue: Trickiness can involve associations and play on words.
Purple: The most difficult group, often requiring more creative thought or more obscure connections.
In today's puzzle, the themes cover everything from public spaces to playing with words in movies so it's a fantastic entertaining game.
Yellow Group: Places of public amusement surrounded by nature.
Green Group: Sort out or deal with.
Blue Group: Film titles with ’S’ removed.
Violet Group: Legal terms to do with the law.
1. Yellow Group- Grass areas: The yellow group addressed exterior areas that were identified with foliage. The words that feature in this group are:
Green
Lawn
Park
Yard
2. Green Group- Deal With: This group is about words related to solving or handling issues. And this is where the task became challenging. Words include:
Address
Answer
Field
Handle
3. Blue Group - Movies with 'S' Removed: The blue group was a lot of fun. It was movie titles where the letter "S" was removed from every title of a movie. The following words are the solutions for the group:
Car
Goodfella
Jaw
Swinger
4. Purple Group – Law: The purple group comprised all words that could precede ‘law’, which made it the toughest of the four groups. The answers were:
Criminal
Harvard
Lemon
Natural
The creator, Wyna Liu talked about how she came up with the idea for this super-popular daily puzzle in a New York Times article.
Liu said that she took inspiration from her editing career, maintaining an impressive balance through her game boards between challenge and accessibility. She has categories that require only literal meanings and others with more complicated word associations, such as homophones or palindromes. She also keeps track of ideas in a notebook and presents them to her class in an arrangement of colourful spreadsheets and provides a level of difficulty to each category.
The direction in which this puzzle was developed was further modified by feedback from the testers themselves, said the infamous creator. Early versions contained specialized types like card games, but testers were confused by proper nouns. Liu adapted once more and paid more attention to general categories and optimized word overlap to make it challenging.
The real work fell onto Heidi Erwin's shoulders, a digital puzzle designer, and she taught Liu how to present visual information and fine-tune gameplay experience. Together they have improved detail after detail, from the number of categories, visual feedback, and gameplay mechanics, so "Connections" continues to be fun every day.