Connections is one of the most popular games on the NYT Games app and with good reason. It’s a fun challenge that’s easy to pick up and quick to play each and every day. It’s a great companion to Wordle, Spelling Bee, the Crossword and so forth.
The game is certainly straightforward enough. You have 16 words on a grid and have to figure out how to group them into groups of four. Each group – Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple – is a different “theme” and theoretically each is a bit harder than the last, with the Purple group especially difficult.
But there’s a pretty major design flaw. Most of the time, the vast majority of players will figure out the Yellow, Green and Blue groups first. This leaves them with four remaining words, and even if they don’t know how exactly those words fit together or what the theme could be, the answer is still inevitable. Obviously those final four words go together.
This is a deeply unsatisfying way to solve a puzzle and it makes Connections a fundamentally broken game. The hardest group should not simply be the leftovers, the words you cobble together at the end no matter what. There must be room for error right to the bitter end.
The simple fix is simply adding extra words to the puzzle. Even one extra word could make this far more challenging and far more satisfying in the process. You could theoretically add four more words if you wanted an even grid, but I think one would do the trick.
This would also allow the game to have two modes: Easy Mode, where guessing the incorrect word simply counted against your handful of tries; and Hard Mode, where the extra word was a Poison Word. Choosing the Poison Word as part of your guess would immediately result in losing that day’s game. I don’t like this by default, as I think it could be incredibly frustrating for players, but as an option it’s great.
This simple change would make Connections a much better game. As it stands, as fun as it is, it’s still broken on a design level. Not so broken that it doesn’t work, but broken nonetheless.