Wordle is still a daily fixture for me and my friends, but it’s losing its shine. I think I’ll finally rid myself of this daily hang-up once I get that ever-elusive perfect guess from my still-unfeatured starting word. I wish I could move on without finding a replacement, but I can’t. Connections is here, and it’s the first daily game I pick up on a morning.
Capitalizing on Wordle’s format, The New York Times has added to its growing collection of 24-hour delights with an altogether different but no less compelling grid quiz. Perhaps the reason it resonates with people like me is because it draws inspiration from the classic “Connecting Wall” round of Only Connect: an incredibly popular but downright devious British game show that’s been on screens in Blighty for 15 years.
Only Connect–a game also unsurprisingly about connections–is the kind of quiz that appears to revel in its pomposity. Questions are labeled with hieroglyphs (“I’ll take ‘twisted flax’ please”). Some answers are so niche that you don’t understand them once they’ve been explained. It’s also the game show where the finest quiz minds go to earn their stripes–two Chasers from the U.K. version of The Chase were on winning teams. As a result, you feel like an absolute legend for just getting one or two questions right.
Things aren’t as brutal in the NYT’s Connections, but the satisfaction is on par with Only Connect’s “Connecting Wall”, which is the exact same proposition:
- You’re given 16 words in a grid;
- You need to identify the hidden relationships between them;
- You then choose four groups of four words with a common theme; and
- Players only get a handful of incorrect guesses to solve the puzzle.
Developing on Only Connect’s format, the NYT also offers hints explaining how many moves you’re “out” of a perfect set, and it also categorizes the quartet of topics by category colors: yellow represents “the most straightforward” theme, and they get more difficult through green, blue, and purple.
Connections preys on players by luring them into false senses of security, using words with multiple meanings that could well relate to one another in different ways. It also requires a lot of critical thinking–it might be a theme, but they might have a language pattern, or share a suffix to make a new word, and so on.
It’s already going down a storm. According to the New York Times, it’s the most successful launch of any game it’s developed in-house since the Mini Crossword in 2014, and is the Games section’s second most-played game after Wordle. What’s more, around nine in every ten player attempts is finished each day, whether through solving or simply running out of guesses.
You can play Connections here. What’s more, if you get stuck, the venerable Kris Holt regularly offers hints and answers to each daily quiz here.
Read the full article here
