Connections

Sixteen words, four hidden groups of four. Connections is a daily sorting puzzle where the link can be a plain category, a shared feature, or sly wordplay — and the board is built to tempt you toward the wrong split. Everyone gets the same puzzle, refreshed at midnight UTC.

1. 1

   Find the four groups

   Every word belongs to exactly one group. Some connections are straightforward categories; others hide in the words themselves — what they can precede or follow, how they sound, how they’re spelled. When a word looks like it fits two groups, one of them is a decoy.

   Hot ___

   DOG, TUB, SAUCE, STREAK

   A solved group locks in as a banner like this. DOG may have tempted you toward an animals group — that’s the game.

2. 2

   Submit a guess

   Select four tiles and press Submit. A correct guess locks the group in as a coloured banner and reveals its connection. Shuffle rearranges the remaining tiles whenever the current layout stops speaking to you — it often does.
3. 3

   Watch your mistakes

   A wrong guess costs one of your four allowed mistakes — the dots above the board count what’s left. If three of your four words did share a group, a “One away!” toast tells you so. It doesn’t say which three.
4. 4

   Read the colours

   The groups are graded by difficulty, so the colours tell you how deep the trick runs. The clock starts when you press Play and stops on the last group — the fastest verified solve becomes today’s best.

   Yellow — the most straightforward

   Green — a step trickier

   Blue — harder than it looks

   Purple — the twist, usually wordplay