Personal Connections
Let's make one.
Like Strands and Wordle, Connections has inspired a site for those who love the format of its puzzles but would like to experience them more often than once a day in an unarchived format forever. This one’s called Connections Plus, and just like before, I’ve made a few games of my own that you can try out.
Here’s my first game…
And my third.
As you’ll see (or have seen, if you interrupted reading this to do some playing), I had a lot of fun with red herrings like the one that tripped me up yesterday. I mentioned that a Connections puzzle could have five entries that all suited a category, when the rules make it clear that only four can be chosen—because the odd one out also belongs to another category. You could also do that with six or even seven.
But I favored another kind of trick that I’ve seen in the NYT version (including today’s installment): making an altogether fake category. Spoiler for puzzle #1 follows…if you want to solve it unspoiled, don’t read past this image…!
Okay. So AMAZON, GOOGLE, META, and APPLE are all big tech-company names, and you’d expect they’d be in a category together. But in fact, none of these four are in a category together! APPLE is in the “Fruits” group, GOOGLE is in the “seek information about” group (along with VET, RESEARCH, and EYEBALL), META is in an “anagrams” group (with TEAM, TAME, and MEAT) and AMAZON, along with YELLOW, COLORADO, and MISSISSIPPI, is a river.
I used fake categories for the other two puzzles too, but in one of them, the four entries are only spread over three different categories. There are other little red herrings as well, like the way YELLOW seems like it might belong with CHERRY, ORANGE, and PEACH until APPLE makes you realize it’s fruit, not colors.
Beyond identifying these tricks, I don’t have as many concrete tips for future improv puzzles—mine or anybody else’s—as I did for strands. The important thing is to make sure you don’t stray too far out of common knowledge, at least not with more than one category.
NYT’s Connections gets away with a lot in its purple zone. I mentioned that the answer can be song titles or altered TV titles—they can also be things like words ending with numbers (ALONE, OFTEN) or (in editor Wyna Liu’s favorite trick) words that complete phrases (e.g., MOOSE, MARKET, RUN, and TERRIER for BULL ___.
The purple category for my third puzzle was, I expect, the hardest of the lot. It’s a bit of trivia you won’t be surprised that I know, but not something I expect everyone else to jump at. But because it’s just one category (and I kept the other three a bit easier than usual), I expect many solvers to get it through elimination and the rest to appreciate its niche appeal.
Oh, one more thing. You can always change the difficulty rankings of the four categories if a category come out easier or harder than you expect. And of course, you can adjust the contents of those categories to make them a little harder or easier—ease up on the use of words with multiple meanings, or double down.
Feel free to give it a try! As with most creative pursuits—like freestyle alliteration—my motto is “the more, the merrier.”