The daily Connections is Wordle’s clever cousin

polygon.com:

I was one of the zillions transfixed by the Wordle phenomenon. Not just on the five-letter-word guessing game, but all the clones. Every morning, I would sweat over choosing the perfect words in order to maintain my Wordle streak — which I held for a year, thank you — then launch directly into Dordle, Quordle, Octordle, and a few of the non-word games that ripped off the premise (though I never got into Worldle — haven’t done enough traveling). I followed Wordle to the New York Times after the million-dollar acquisition and felt highly competitive even after the “PARER” incident of September 2022, but like many, fell off the Wordle train pretty hard when I broke my streak on a word I refuse to remember. Please don’t make me dredge up those memories; I am only human.

While I am a semi-regular New York Times Crossword filler-outer, nothing in the media brand’s gaming portfolio has commanded my attention since my year of Wordle. That is, until this summer, when I decided to make Connections my personality.

The daily Connections game offers players a grid of 16 words. The mission: Suss out the common threads between four different sets of words without FUUUUUCKIN’ UUUUUUP. The grouping logic can be all over the place, with connections ranging from simple (“they’re all animals, dummy”) to murky (“synonyms for farting”) to sneakier wordplay (“countries when the letter ‘a’ is added”). Each puzzle offers four levels of difficulty — yellow, green, blue, and purple — and only four misses. As with Wordle, there are no points or prizes, just bragging rights. Unlike Wordle, there is no win tally or streak counter, so if you miss a day, you don’t have to consider moving out of town never to show your face again.

Connections hasn’t