The New York Times now offers daily hints for its Connections word game

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

The New York Times will now offer daily hints for Connections, its delightful yet sometimes frustrating daily word game.

In Connections, you’re tasked with finding four sets of associations between 16 words. Each “solution” groups four words together, but the groupings can be tough to figure out. (I only got one correct grouping on Monday’s puzzle.) If you’re stuck, the new Connections Companion offers a difficulty rating (Monday’s was 3.5 out of 5, which I strongly disagree with) and hints you can use to get help without spoiling the entire puzzle.

Here’s how the hints work. The game’ssolutions are grouped by color as an indicator of that group’s difficulty, though you’ll only see these colors after you correctly assemble a group. Yellow marks the “straightforward” category, while the green, blue, and purple groups are intended to be increasingly more tricky to figure out. The Connections Companion has a list of those four colors represented by emoji squares, and you can click the color to see one of the words included in that grouping for that day.

These hints seem really useful; more than once, I’ve stared blankly at a Connections board without any idea of how the words might match up with one another, so using a hint could point me in the right direction to actually solve the day’s puzzle. And if the daily hints aren’t enough, you can ask for a clue in the comments of each day’s Connections Companion — perhaps a kind soul will help you out.

The Connections Companion series will be accessible from this New York Times archive, and a new one will be posted