When you are on Facebook, if you see the following graphic with some kind of comment below, you know that one of your friends has succumbed to the addiction that is the NY Times game – Connections.
Social media graphic that shows your success (or lack thereof) for the day with the online Connections game. For the unfamiliar, guessing one of each color means you had one word from each of the four separate categories in your guess, showing that you had the ultimate wrong answer. Clicking on the image will take you to the current game board.
The game is both deceptively simple and insanely complex. Each day, the Connections puzzle displays a 4×4 grid of 16 words (or occasionally symbols). The player is charged with putting the 16 words into four separate categories exhibiting some kind of similarity (or connection) that binds each set of four words together, rated from easy (yellow) to very hard (purple).
Here is an example board from a year ago. Clicking on it will take you to an article from KSAT News about the game.
The game has a passionate following from millions, including your author and many of my friends. My Dear Wife no longer wants to hear anything I have to say on the subject over our morning coffee. Wyna Liu, the editor of the daily puzzle from The Times, inspires a wide range of responses from players depending on how they feel about the day’s puzzle, including professions of despair and hate.
Recently The Atlantic’s website ran a fascinating interview with Liu in which she talks about how the game’s boards are created, what types of connections the words can have, and how she feels about people’s intense reactions to the game.
There are also tools out there where you can create your own Connections board that will be even more interesting than the official ones. For example, here’s a post-election day one profanity-laced board from from science blogger Hank Green (who is also YA author John Green’s brother).
Are you a Connections junkie? Tell us about it in the comments.