Connections Unlimited
Sixteen words, four hidden groups, and not one trivia question.
Sixteen words sit on the board, and four groups of four are hiding in them. What ties a group together is always the shape of the words themselves: a smaller word buried inside each one, a shared beginning or ending, a first letter you can strip off and still be left with a word. Never trivia, never current events. You get four mistakes to pull all four threads apart.
How to play
- Tap four tiles you think share a connection, then press Submit.
- Get it right and the thread locks in at the top, showing you what tied those four words together.
- Get it wrong and you lose one of four mistakes. If three of your four belonged together, you'll be told you were one away.
- Connections are always structural: a hidden word (SHERLOCK, FLOCK, BLOCKS all bury LOCK), a shared start or finish (BATHROOM, BALLROOM, CLASSROOM), or a word that survives losing its first letter (SPACE → PACE).
- Shuffle rearranges the tiles. Use it whenever you've stopped seeing anything new. It's free and it doesn't count against you.
- Find all four threads to win. Four mistakes and the remaining threads are revealed.
Your statistics
One puzzle a day
One board a day, the same sixteen words for everyone. Your first attempt is the one that counts: it feeds your win rate, your streak, and your flawless total (a flawless win is all four threads found without a single mistake).
After that the play button just keeps dealing from a library of puzzles we've already verified. Play as many as you want. None of them touch your record, which is exactly what makes them the right place to practise spotting buried words.
If you've played a word grouping puzzle before
Sixteen tiles, four groups of four: that shape will look familiar if you've played The New York Times' Connections. This game isn't affiliated with the NYT and never reuses its puzzles. The difference worth knowing is what holds a group together. NYT Connections links words by meaning and cultural reference. Here the links live in the letters and nothing else, so there's never anything to look up.
The other difference is how much of it you get. One puzzle a day is the one that counts toward your streak. After that you can keep playing as long as you want, and every past daily stays open in the archive.
Why there's no trivia here
Most word-grouping puzzles lean on general knowledge and cultural references, which quietly turns them into a test of where you grew up rather than how well you read. If a group is "things a New Yorker complains about", no amount of care with the words in front of you will get you there. That seemed like the wrong game to build.
So the threads here live entirely in the letters. A player in Manila and a player in Manchester get the same puzzle and the same information, and neither one is at a disadvantage for not having watched the right television.
Every puzzle has exactly one answer
The worst moment in a grouping game is finding a grouping that genuinely works and being told you're wrong. So before a puzzle ships, a solver enumerates every possible way to split the sixteen tiles into four connected groups. If more than one split works, the puzzle doesn't ship.
The decoys, on the other hand, are planted on purpose. A typical puzzle has dozens of four-tile groups that are perfectly valid on their own. Only one arrangement uses all sixteen tiles at once.
One caveat, because it matters: what's guaranteed is that no second structural grouping exists. A puzzle can't be proof against every reading a person might invent. It can be proof against every reading the game itself would accept, and that's the check we run.
Tips for pulling threads apart
- Start with what you're sure of, not with what you noticed first. The obvious four almost always contains a decoy.
- Count how many tiles could join a group. If five words share a beginning, one of them belongs somewhere else, and working out which one is the whole puzzle.
- When you're stuck, read the tiles letter by letter. Buried words hide best in the middle of longer words, where nothing draws your eye.
- Solve by elimination. A thread you couldn't see for ten minutes becomes obvious the moment the other twelve tiles are gone.
- Shuffle often. Most of this game is a fight against your own first reading.
The four kinds of thread
Hidden word. A shorter word buried inside all four, sitting in a different position each time. GRATEFUL, CORPORATE, STRATEGIC and OPERATE all conceal RATE.
Shared beginning. Four words that open with the same word, where what's left is also a word: HOMEWORK, HOMELESS, HOMETOWN, HOMEMADE.
Shared ending. The same, from the other side: COURTROOM, BALLROOM, BATHROOM, CLASSROOM.
Beheadings. Four words that are still words after you delete the first letter. STOOL becomes TOOL, TROLL becomes ROLL. There's no shared word to spot here, which is why this is almost always the last thread anyone finds.
Streaks and the daily archive
Win the daily puzzle on consecutive days and you build a streak. Miss a day and it resets. Nothing you do in the archive changes either number, which is the point: every past daily stays open in the archive so you can catch up on a day you missed, or work backwards through older puzzles until buried words start jumping out at you.