Let's Play: Connections

Managing foursomes.

Connections doesn't require a lot of explanation. You're given a 4x4 grid of sixteen words, and you have to sort it into four groups of four. The categories you sort them intovcan be based on anything the words have in common.

The trickiness is in the details. “Anything” means anything: recent games have had categories like singularized TV show titles (CHEER, WEED, SCRUB, and FRIEND for Cheers, Weeds, Scrubs, and Friends) and Mariah Carey #1 hits (FANTASY, HERO, HONEY, SOMEDAY). But usually only one category is that tricky. Almost always, at least one category is just four words that mean the same thing when you think about them.

Let's walk through today's installment together. Spoilers if you haven't done it yet.

These puzzles often use proximity to trick me a bit. The first thing I see is TAPE and RECORDING together. This could refer to some kind of video record. But nothing else in the grid backs this up, so it's probably a dead end. PASS and KEY likewise could refer to some kind of access, but I'm not getting anything else from that either, so that's probably a no-go.

But what about PASS and HAND? Those can both be the same thing as GIVE if you're in the same room with the person you're giving it to. Can I find a fourth? Well, SENDing is another kind of giving. I'm a little nervous about this because it doesn't fit the same-room idea that I've been using for the other three. But I decide it's close enough to be worth a try. I tap all four squares and then I hit “Submit.”

It works.

What's next? Well I see a few items that I remember from my elementary school days that would probably be considered office supplies. RULER, SCISSORS, STAPLE, TAPE.

Oops. That was a mistake, one of three that I'm allowed before I lose the game. However, the interface tells me that I was just one away from getting it right. So “office supplies” may be a valid idea and worth coming back to. I notice now that PEN also fits the category.

That's one common trick with these puzzles: listing five items that could be placed in the category when only four actually can. PEN seems like it should replace one of the four I have. But which one?

Since everything in this puzzle gets used somewhere, the “unused office supply” has to be part of some other category elsewhere. RULER and TAPE both have alternate meanings, but STAPLE, in the sense of a basic requirement, seems to have equivalents in the grid:

This time, I do a quick check, and these do seem to be the only four squares that mean “necessity.” So I submit.

Good deal. It's a little unusual that I haven't found the yellow category yet. Yellow is meant to be the easiest, followed by green, then blue, with purple the hardest. Think of it like going down a rainbow. But every puzzlemaker has to admit that hardness is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

That said, the fact that I haven't found yellow yet tells me I might be missing something that was meant to be obvious. Are there any more synonyms in those remaining eight squares?

Hmmm…not really. But there are those remaining office supplies, so let's just do those.

The last four you can get just by process of elimination, and you don't need to have figured out what they have in common. As I said above, the hardest categories can sometimes get really obscure. This time though, I think I've got it. RECORDING, APPLAUSE, WALK, EXIT…those are all signs you might see on stage, right? I'm not sure about WALK, but I am sure about the other three…

Ah! Well, close enough.

Tomorrow: Making our own.