I love my NY Times digital subscription. I get access to:
- The best newspaper in the country
- The Athletic, the premier sports reporting site on the web. Off the charts articles and terrific newsletters.
- Wirecutter. I rarely make a purchase without checking their recommendations.
- And of course, the famous NY Times games, including Wordle and Connections
I do Wordle, Connections, and the Mini-crossword every day. I’m kind of obsessed. Today, I’ll share my thoughts and strategies on Connections, a game that I find fun, challenging, and often frustrating.
- So the first thing I do is I always hit the shuffle button right away before even looking at the puzzle. I find that they sometimes will put two items in the upper left — the place your eye naturally goes to — that try to get you thinking one way, and that way is often not productive. They try to trick you, and I shuffle things before I can get that fake connection in my head.
- At any point in playing, I frequently hit shuffle to shake things up and get me thinking in a different direction.
- If I make a wrong guess and they tell you “One guess away”, I never try to figure out the correct, missing item. I always press “Deselect all” and go off to something else and maybe come back to it later. (Well, okay, “never” and “always” are storng words here. Sometimes I try, but usually to no avail…) Often, I find a different connection between one of the off-by-one guesses, and then go back. (As a side note, 97% of my failures are the result of getting impatient about this and trying wrong combinations.
- Purple is the hardest category, and almost always is a common word association between the four, as opposed to the four words being directly related. For instance, “couch”, “baked”, “hot”, and “sweet” are all associated with “potato”. I always look for that kind of thing first. Getting purple out of the way early usually makes things go smoother by removing red herring connections.
- One thing that bugs me about the game: The “Mistakes Remaining” is off by one: If you have one mistake remaining, there are actually two little dots. This is not right. Yes, I’m a coding nerd.
- I have more than once had a perfect game getting the connections “in order” — yellow, green, blue, purple. I’m yet to reach Connections Nirvana — purple, blue, green, yellow. I do have a friend that got it once!
- Impatience is usually my failing. Often, the best thing to do is to set the game aside and come back to it later.
- Occasionally I will have absolutely no clue about one of the words in a group. None. Never heard of it ever. This is frustrating. ;-)
One final note: I absolutely LOVE the color scheme used by the Games app. I’m going to try to integrate that color palette in to this site.