NYT Connections: rules, the four difficulty tiers, and a method for the purple group

The board and the four tiers

Wyna Liu is credited as editor on every board in HintSheet's archive (the 41 boards from 1 September to 11 October 2026) and on the very first puzzle, 12 June 2023, in NYT's puzzle data. The game's How to Play panel gives the rules: find groups of four items that share something in common, select four and submit, and find the groups without making four mistakes. Each group is assigned a colour that is revealed as you solve: yellow is labelled Straightforward, green Medium, blue Difficult and purple Tricky. While you play you see only sixteen words in a shuffled 4×4 grid. A correct group locks in with its colour and name; a wrong one costs a mistake. If three of your four belong together the game says "One away...", and a group you have already tried gets "Already guessed!" instead of costing another mistake.

Liu explained the tiers when the beta opened. She wanted yellow to be the most straightforward category, "a foothold for solvers", and purple to be the trickiest, "a stand-alone puzzle incorporating a wordplay element"; green and blue were sorted by how much they relied on unfamiliar terms or trivia. She also found that item overlap — words that fit more than one group — made a board harder more effectively than trivia did. The How to Play panel says the same thing to players: each puzzle has exactly one solution, so watch out for words that seem to belong to multiple categories.

The purple group's recurring tricks

We sorted all 41 purple categories in the archive window by the wording of the Times' own titles. Five kinds of letter or phrase trick, named in the titles themselves, covered 36 of them; the other five described a meaning or a pattern. Once you can name the mechanism you can usually find the group by scanning letters rather than meanings.

Fill in the blank (12 of 41). Every word pairs with the same partner: AIR ___ (CONDITIONER, GUITAR, KISS, QUOTES) on 9 October, ___CASE (BRIEF, PILLOW, STAIR, UPPER) on 18 September, WORDS BEFORE "FORCE" on 9 September. Blue used the same device four times, which is why a blank in a title is not proof of purple.

Ending in a hidden word (10). The category lives in the last letters: ENDING IN TALENTS (CATSKILL, KNICKKNACK, PIANOFORTE, STABILITY) on 6 October, ENDING IN CHINESE DYNASTIES (BBQING, HOMING, LOHAN, WU-TANG) on 27 September.

Starting with a hidden word (6). STARTING WITH MONTH ABBREVIATIONS (DECENT, NOVELTY, OCTOPUSSY, SEPTUM) on 30 September; STARTS OF NYT PRINT PUZZLES (ACRO, CROSS, KEN, SUD) on 1 October.

A letter added or removed (5). CANDY BARS PLUS A LETTER (DOVES, MARSH, SKORT, TWIXT) on 8 September; DESSERTS MINUS LAST LETTER (COBBLE, PI, TAR, TORT) on 5 September; BEVERAGES WITH ACUTE ACCENTS REMOVED (CAFE, PATRON, ROSE, THE) on 22 September.

Hidden inside, or rearranged (3). PHRASES HIDING GREEK LETTERS (FREEZE TAG, HOME GAME, MODEL TANK, ORAL PHASE) on 29 September; ACCESSORIES INSIDE STARTING AND ENDING LETTERS on 4 September; and one ANAGRAMS board (BEER HAT, BREATHE, HERB TEA, THE BEAR) on 24 September.

Meaning, and one oddity (5). Not every purple is wordplay: SPREADSHEET FUNCTIONS (AVERAGE, COUNT, MAX, SUM), THINGS THAT ARE PUSHED METAPHORICALLY, THINGS THAT APPEAR AT THE END, "COOL" THINGS, IN EXPRESSIONS, and one letter-pattern oddity, THREE LETTERS PLUS REPEATED TRIGRAMS (ARKANSANS, CHIHUAHUA, POSSESSES, SPRINGING). No purple in the window was built on homophones; the one sound-based group, WORDS THAT SOUND LIKE TWO LETTERS (EMPTY, EXCESS, KEWPIE, ODIE), was blue.

The practical rule: if the remaining words don't share a meaning, check their first and last few letters before anything else. Starting-with and ending-in groups were 16 of the 41 purples on their own.

A routine that protects your four mistakes

The game ends on the fourth mistake, so the routine below is built around not spending them on groups you have not checked.

Read all sixteen before touching anything. Count how many words look like they belong to each obvious category. Any category with five or six candidates is where the overlap the Times warns about lives — do not submit it first.

Submit the group with exactly four candidates. A clean lock-in removes four distractors from the board and makes every later decision easier.

When a category has five candidates, find the fifth word's other home. One of the five belongs to a different group. Ask which one has a *second* plausible category; that word is the likely overlap, and the other four are your group.

Treat 'One away...' as information. Three of your four are right. Swap the word you were least sure of — the one with another plausible home — rather than abandoning the group.

Leave the strangest four for last. When twelve words are locked, the remaining four are a group no matter how odd they look. Submit them and read the category name afterwards.

A board, start to finish

The board from 2 September 2026 is a clean example of the overlap Liu described. The sixteen words: DAZZLE, FLOOR, STUN, WOW, BOW, MUTE, ROSIN, SHOULDER REST, HUNTING, RESCUE, SAUSAGE, SHEEP, CORN, PRAIRIE, SALTY, TOP.

Read all sixteen. One category leaps out and is too big: words that go before DOG. HUNTING dog, RESCUE dog, SAUSAGE dog, SHEEP dog, CORN dog, PRAIRIE dog, SALTY dog, TOP dog — eight candidates, twice a group. Meanwhile DAZZLE, FLOOR, STUN and WOW all mean astonish, and BOW, MUTE, ROSIN and SHOULDER REST are all things you would find with a violin.

Submit the clean fours. The astonish words were yellow, FLABBERGAST. The violin words were green, THINGS IN A VIOLIN CASE. Both have exactly four candidates, so both are safe first guesses, and they clear eight words without touching the dogs.

Split the eight. With eight ___ DOG words left, the question is what separates two groups of four. The Times' titles answer it: blue was ___ DOGS (THAT ARE DOGS) — HUNTING, RESCUE, SAUSAGE, SHEEP — and purple was ___ DOGS (THAT AREN'T DOGS) — CORN, PRAIRIE, SALTY, TOP. A sausage dog is a dachshund; a prairie dog is a rodent. Four DOG words picked at random from the eight have under a 3% chance of being a correct group and about a 46% chance of drawing "One away...", which is why the two clean groups come first.

Wrong groups people submit, and why

The board is built to produce these, and each one shows up in the archive window.

• The eight-candidate category, submitted as four. On 2 September eight words took DOG. Never submit from a category with more than four candidates until you have found what splits it.
• A real category that is a decoy. On 13 September GARFIELD sat in the green group U.S. PRESIDENTS, while ODIE sat in the blue group WORDS THAT SOUND LIKE TWO LETTERS. Anyone who saw a cartoon-cat pair had found something real and wrong.
• Entries that look like phrases, and are. 118 of the 656 cards in the window contained a space — SHOULDER REST, PINKY SWEAR, TUCKED AWAY — and several purple groups depended on them: STARTING WITH WORDS OF INTENTION on 1 September used AIMEE MANN, HOPE DIAMOND, PLANETARIUM and WISHY-WASHY.
• Solving purple by meaning. CATSKILL, KNICKKNACK, PIANOFORTE and STABILITY have no shared meaning; the link is SKILL, KNACK, FORTE and ABILITY at the ends. If four words refuse to agree on a sense, read their edges.
• Ignoring 'One away...'. Three of four were right. Swap one — the least certain — not two.

Reading the difficulty of a board before you start

The Times does not publish a difficulty rating for Connections boards beyond the four tier labels, and it has not described a weekly difficulty pattern. Some signals are visible in ten seconds. A board with several long, multi-word entries often hides a starting-with or ending-in group inside the phrases, as on 29 September (FREEZE TAG, HOME GAME, MODEL TANK, ORAL PHASE). A board where eight or more words fit one obvious theme has the theme split across two groups, as with the eight DOG words on 2 September. Liu also noted that unusually short or long entries draw attention, so the Times is careful with them; a very short entry — PI, G, UN — is often there because a letter trick needs it.

Special boards do happen. Wikipedia records that the April Fools' boards in 2025 and 2026 played with symbols, letters, fonts and colours, and that the 1,000th puzzle, on 7 March 2026, used the game's icon as one of the tiles.

What the Times does and doesn't tell you

The Times publishes a daily *Connections Companion* column, which the game itself links to, and the How to Play panel inside the game gives the rules, two sample categories (FISH: BASS, FLOUNDER, SALMON, TROUT; FIRE ___: ANT, DRILL, ISLAND, OPAL) and a promise that categories are always more specific than "5-LETTER-WORDS", "NAMES" or "VERBS". The game has an archive mode for past puzzles. Everything on HintSheet's Connections archive comes from NYT's puzzle data for each date we published, with the category names as the Times wrote them.

One detail from the game's stats screen is worth knowing: what it records is mistakes. It keeps a mistake distribution alongside wins and streaks, and its badges reward a Perfect Puzzle (no mistakes) and Purple First (solving the purple group before the others).

How Connections has changed since 2023

The beta opened on 12 June 2023, and Liu's own account of building it is the best record of the early game. Her task was 60 boards for the beta; she began by sorting category ideas into the four colours and expected to pick one from each column, but found she rarely used the trivia-heavy blue ideas because specialised vocabulary was hard to hide. Testers also pushed back on proper nouns — an early trading-card-games group (KEYFORGE, MAGIC, POKÉMON, YU-GI-OH) threw them off — and preferred more general categories.

Since then the main game has kept its rules while adding around them. The Athletic launched a separate sports edition of Connections in beta on 24 September 2024, according to Wikipedia; puzzle #1,000 arrived on 7 March 2026; and the game's code now numbers each board as the days since 12 June 2023 plus one, which made 11 October 2026 puzzle #1,218. The category names quoted on HintSheet's answer pages are the Times' wording, which matters because a title like ___ DOGS (THAT AREN'T DOGS) is itself a clue to the mechanism.

Questions readers actually send

"I had three groups right and still lost — how?" The fourth mistake ends the game, wherever it falls. When twelve words are locked, the remaining four are the answer; submit them.

"Why was my group wrong when all four words fit the category?" Because another word also fit, and the Times' intended group used it. The How to Play panel warns about exactly this: each puzzle has exactly one solution, and some words seem to belong to more than one category.

"Is there a way to see yesterday's board?" Every board HintSheet has published is in the archive by date, with the four groups and the category names.

"Does the order I solve in matter?" Not for the result, but the Times notices it: there is a Purple First badge for solving the hardest group before the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Connections answers

Every past puzzle is in the Connections archive. New here? Start with the Connections guide.