I must admit that I enjoy puzzles, especially those that include logic and/or words. I'm interested puzzles where you have to think for a while before you can offer a guess, like Sudoku, crosswords, and Wordle. The New York Times Games app contains all of these features and more (Spelling Bee! ), which helps me somewhat justify the $40 per year I spend on pointless puzzles.
Unbeknownst to me, a user of the NYT Games app, the Paper of Record has recently released a new online brain teaser, and it seems to be having a moment. The newest game to join their collection, Connections, has straightforward principles but surprisingly challenging solutions.
You are given a collection of 16 words in each of the daily Connections puzzles, and you must categorize them into four sets of four based on their shared characteristics. The difficulty level of each group's themes rises as the game progresses. Groups from yesterday included "Desserts" (cake, cobbler, pie, and tart), "Occupational Surnames" (Fisher, Mason, Miller, and Smith), and "Alter Deceptively" and "Square ___" as the other two. Hence, "cobbler" and "doctor," which were both parts of Alter Deceptively, could have been misinterpreted as professions. The Square __ groupings included the words One, Root, Dance, and Dinner as fill-in words. You get the idea. Using ambiguity to deceive.
Although there is a small learning curve, they are a lot of fun. Making a connection between four words but not the one the problem intended can be a little frustrating at first. We've made a few coffee-themed connections game for your Friday frivolity to help everyone get the hang of things. The first one, which can be found here, is a good primer on the format and uses several common words. The second one, though, presents a greater challenge. Nothing too crazy for coffee addicts, though maybe less so for the rest of us.
Thus, as you start your Connections journey, please enjoy these coffee-related mental teasers. And if you're feeling creative, you can always make your own and tweet it to us.
Zac Cadwalader is a managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer located in Dallas. Read more by Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
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