New York Times’ Latest Puzzle Is Now Its Second-Most-Played Game

Image via New York Times

Do you feel kind of empty after your daily dose of Wordle? The New York Times has yet another game to fill that void.

On Monday, the newspaper announced that its latest puzzle, Connections, has officially joined its games lineup and is now ready to play on the iOS and Android versions of the New York Times Games app, after a more than successful round of testing on desktop and mobile web, where the game is still available.

How successful, you ask? Well, even before the puzzle made it into the app this week, it rose to become the Times’ most popular game that was developed in-house and its second-most-played game of all time—after Wordle, of course. And that was when it was still in beta.

Connections is a daily word association puzzle where you’re shown 16 terms and are tasked to split them into four sets of four.

On paper, it sounds simple, but the categories can be abstract and wide-ranging. “Imagine, say, four colors or four exclamations of joy,” notes David Leonhardt on Sunday’s The Morning newsletter.

Take, for example, this puzzle that this DesignTAXI writer completed on July 25, which attempts to throw players off with anagrams.

Screenshots via New York Times Games app

Many puzzles will feature overlapping words that seem suited for more than one category, and the challenge is being able to group exactly four terms together. Players have only four tries until their game gets cut short.

Solvers have loved Connections so much that the Times has left it just as it was when it first rolled out in beta on June 12. The only thing the paper has tweaked is the writing in the instructions, for clarity.

The newspaper is especially proud that each round of the in-house-designed game is thoughtfully curated by editors each day.

“Each day reveals a clever, thoughtful, relevant, human-made puzzle that tries to trick you, and makes the challenge of solving it extremely rewarding,” quips head of games Jonathan Knight.

[via TechCrunch, CNN, New York Times, images via various sources]