The New York Times Connections

Connections is a word puzzle developed and published by The New York Times as part of The New York Times Games. It was released for PC on June 12, 2023, during its beta phase. It is the second-most-played game that is published by Times, behind Wordle.

Several figures associated with Only Connect, a British television quiz show, commented on its similarity to the Connecting Wall in the program.

Gameplay
In Connections, the goal is to divide a grid of sixteen words into four groups of four such that the words in each group belong to a specific category (e.g., "dog", "cat", "fish", and "parrot" for the category "Household Pets"). The categories may involve wordplay such as palindromes or homophones, increasing the difficulty. When a player successfully identifies a group, its category is revealed along with a color-coded difficulty level: categories are rated yellow, green, blue, or purple, with yellow being the most straightforward and purple being the most difficult. Each Connections game has one category from each difficulty level.

For April Fools' Day of 2024, the game temporarily used emojis instead of words.

Development
The games department of the Times hosts an annual game jam in which participants suggest ideas for upcoming games to release to the website. Connections had been in development for a year before releasing in its beta phase on June 12, 2023. Wyna Liu, editor of the Times and Connectionss puzzles, was inspired by cartoonist Robert Leighton, who made puzzles involving wordplay.