Meet NYT Connections, the Word Game That Turned Four Small Groups Into a Daily Ritual

A game jam made it, a crossword editor finished it

Connections was not born from a whiteboard and a five-year plan. It came out of The New York Times games department's annual game jam, spent about a year in development, and launched in beta on June 12, 2023. By the end of August that year it had rolled out across the company's apps, and it became the most successful in-house game launch since the Mini Crossword arrived in 2014.

The game jam that produced it is a standing tradition at the Times' games department, a short stretch where staffers prototype whatever idea will not leave them alone, and most of those prototypes quietly die. Connections is the one that refused to.

The editor behind it is Wyna Liu, a crossword constructor who joined the Times in 2020 and now builds the boards herself, releasing a new one each day. She has cited the picture puzzles of cartoonist Robert Leighton, which reward the same lateral, visual word play, as an inspiration. And the game has an unlikely television godparent, which is where the story gets fun.

That is Victoria Coren Mitchell, host of the BBC quiz show Only Connect, sizing up Connections when it arrived. Her show's Connecting Wall round asks teams to do the same thing - sort sixteen clues into four groups of four. She sounded more amused than aggrieved, which is the correct response to discovering your niche format has been turned into a global morning habit.

The second-biggest game in the building

The Times has called Connections its second-most-played game, behind Wordle. I keep returning to that ranking because it undersells something. Wordle is a game you can lose in six guesses. Connections is a game you can lose in four, and a very large number of people play it anyway, often before they check their email.

Part of the pull is the shareable result. A solve produces a tidy colored grid you can paste anywhere, which lets a person broadcast that they cleared the purple one without saying a word. Part of it is the shared reset: a fresh board, a fresh chance to feel clever, delivered to everyone at the same moment.

Why the hint searches exist

The crowd typing "Connections hints" each morning is not the sound of a puzzle failing. It is the sound of one working as designed. The game's makers plant red herrings on purpose - words that seem to belong together so that a wrong guess feels earned - and when you are one mistake from the end, a hint reads less like cheating than like a hand on the small of your back.

What I find generous is that a hint does not spoil the game. Being told that one group is about card games still leaves you the small private satisfaction of finding which four words fit. The answer is a doorway, not the destination.

The detail that made me smile

My favorite detail is not a stat. On April 1, 2024, the Times replaced every word with an emoji, a one-day joke that worked because the game's logic never needed letters in the first place. It is proof of how pure the idea is: four hidden categories, and the words are just the wrapping.

The family has kept growing without losing that core. A sports edition arrived in beta on September 24, 2024 and launched officially on February 9, 2025, with puzzles written by Mark Cooper of The Athletic. A soccer-themed version followed for the 2026 World Cup. All of them are, at heart, the same small game: sixteen things, four secrets, and the click when you see it.

So the next time you reach for a hint at 7 a.m., do not read it as defeat. Read it as the game keeping its quiet promise: four little groups hidden in plain sight, and a whole lot of people who would rather feel the click of the answer together than keep it to themselves.