The New York Times games are fun daily games that everyone can enjoy and stretch their brain muscles with by solving fun puzzles. Connections is one of those games. 

In Connections, you get 16 words, and four different categories. However, you don’t know the categories, and you have to group four words into each category. This may seem fairly easy, but a lot of times they make certain words fit into multiple categories to stump you. Each of the categories is labeled by a color: yellow, green, blue, and purple. As you go down the list, the categories get harder. So, yellow is the easiest and purple is the hardest. However, these are subjective to the person playing, so you may actually find purple the easiest. You have four free guesses to get wrong, and after that, you lose. 

Connections was created by the New York Times and released through beta on June 12, 2023. When it originally came out, it was a fun game. Sometimes a category would stump you, but after using a couple of your free guesses, you would eventually figure it out. 

The categories can be a variety of different things. Sometimes it’s things such as “Plays in football.” It could be a word and then a blank, such as: “____ bear.” The answers were Teddy, Honey, Boo-Boo, and Brown. Other times, it may just be how the word is spelled, such as a palindrome (a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward). 

However, recently, many people have complained about obscure Connections category ideas. Many believe this is simply because they are running out of ideas. Since there are 4 categories each day, and they have to make certain words in different categories relate to each other, it becomes harder to come up with new and simple ideas. 

Some of the obscure categories people have taken to social media to complain about are, “Birds minus last letter,” such as Condo and Haw. On April 5th, the purple category was “Starting with metals.” This one is pretty easy, but there are also so many metals that the right words are hard to spot. On March 29th, all of the words ended with the letter Y, which caused much confusion. The categories were: “Especially,” “Disney characters,” “Kinds of blue,” and “Body parts plus ‘Y’.” Most people took to social media to complain that they didn’t get any of the categories because they ended up running out of guesses.

Yes, it’s understandable that this game is supposed to be a puzzle and somewhat challenge us. But, it should also be fun and something that we can enjoy. If the categories are hard every day and we aren’t able to guess any of them, then what is the point of playing? 

I and many others hope that in the future, the Connections game becomes more reasonable with their categories in order to create a fun and friendly game for everyone to play daily!