Connections: Spotting links and patterns

New York Times’ new word-based game that hopes to extend the charm of Wordle.

Hyderabad: The New York Times (NYT) is on a mission to provide a bouquet of the most compelling word-based games for its legion of readers worldwide. NYT’s 2022 acquisition of Wordle from Josh Wardle was a move to strengthen its foothold in the genre and come 2023, they have a new word game in the “beta” phase -Connections. Connections, in the paraphrased words of its creator Wyna Liu is as inspired by art, playfulness, and cartoons as it is by words and puzzles.

Connections, as a game is as different from Wordle as chalk is from cheese, but its solutions are just as inherently “shareable” on platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, and X (or whatever Twitter is called this week). Thus, be prepared for a bevy of yellow, green, blue, and purple tiles in your feed. In terms of format and style, Connections too offers a new puzzle every day, but it doesn’t track your streak the way Wordle does.

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In terms of play, the game is a lot easier as it just requires you to identify groups of four words (from a total of 16) that share something in common. The identification of the common thread though is not a uniform exercise as not all links are uniformly apparent.

Some are trickier and the four colors the game uses to sort the word groups are indicative of the challenge in identifying the pattern. According to the game’s rules, yellow signifies the most straightforward connection, followed by green, blue, and then purple. However, in my limited experience with the game I often found that pattern identification is seldom mappable to conventional understandings of difficulty and puzzle solving. I would often end up solving the blues and purples before I could identify a “simplistic” yellow or a “moderate” green, this could be explained by either my nearsightedness or sheer obtuseness but also an inability to pickup on contextual cues.

One of the biggest challenges that Connections faces is in its inherent nature to find similarity in the way people anticipate patterns but expecting such a uniformity is easier said than done.

Wordle, on the other hand, was based on Merriam Webster – a text that is globally standard, but how does one standardize the ability to see linkages? For example, in the puzzle on August 4, under the heads “cartoon cats” and “road” NYT expects all of its global reader base to have been exposed to Felix the cat and understand the role of Abbey Road in the Beatles’ music. If that weren’t difficult enough, on the same day, the puzzle also had a head for “presidential first names” and all the four names were of American presidents.

I understand the need for NYT to use references from American culture but then after Wordle it isn’t necessarily an American publication but rather a global outlet and I can’t help but wonder after playing Connections if the game’s experience and expectations are re-widening the chasm that Wordle had managed to bridge with its global appeal.

However, if you do feel confident about your grasp of American cultural references and trivia and are most importantly aware that Lucky, Pop, Tony, and Sam are cereal mascots, Connections could be a fun additional activity after Wordle.