Each category is supposed to be classified from most straightforward to tricky-yellow to purple-but it doesn’t instantly read as more impressive to see a Connections grid in the most difficult order-purple, blue, green, yellow-than it does to see the colors in any other order. Connections, trying to duplicate that success, offers players the option to share their grids, but they lack the at-a-glance comprehensibility of the Wordle grids. Wordle went viral partly thanks to the clever way that players began sharing their results on social media and in text-message conversations, which showed others how they had done with that day’s word without revealing their guesses. The curse of the Times’ massive, craze-level success last year with Wordle may be that any game the Times releases in a post-Wordle universe is inevitably going to be found wanting in comparison. Luke Winkie A Big Hint the Whole Wordle Thing Is Completely Out of Control Read More And surely they just made up that there is a candy bar called “Chunky”? No? That one’s on me, I guess. I’m still not sure what to think of a recent category of words that become countries when “A” is added-chin, cub, malt, tong-but I’m leaning toward not a fan. I’ve found myself wondering if they can actually be solved using logic, or basically require lucky guesses and mind-reading. There are times when I’ll find myself appreciating a particularly inventive category, but there have also been plenty of times when it feels like the categories are random, or only make sense in retrospect. In addition to how we feel about the game on a conceptual level, sometimes we take issue with individual games. Still, I’ve seen a little chatter on social media, some of it praising the game, some of it sharing my gripes. Perhaps the game-makers are recalibrating based on the response they’re getting? Not that the response has been so overwhelming-there are a few sites covering the game’s solution every day, Wordle-style, but a subreddit centered on Connections had just five members as of press time. The game usually feels too easy, but I’ve occasionally been stumped by it. Your first guess might feel something verging on excitingly risky, as you pick four words from a pool of 16, but by the time you’re picking four from a pool of 12, or eight, the air has been let out of the exercise. You get four wrong guesses before you lose, but you just don’t feel like you’re getting down to the wire the same way you do when playing Wordle. You do a lot of the figuring out, such as it is, before you make the first guess, and the fun kind of deflates thereafter. Speaking of that: By the time you get to the last round and only have four options left, why does the game bother having you group and submit them? There’s an unsatisfying lack of progression to the whole thing. Or you can not figure out the rest and still win the game, simply because you’ve got four words left and they have to go together. You may not know all four categories, but if you get one, you can figure out the rest via process of elimination. So aside from the hiccup of accusations of copycatting and an overly literal name that sounds more like a generic social network than a game, what’s not to love about Connections? Well, once you figure out that there’s usually a trick word or two hiding in the grid, there’s not much strategy to the game. In Connections, each correct group of words is transformed into a solid-colored bar, so that when you win, your handiwork is laid out in front of you in the form of four rainbow stripes: If this is starting to sound familiar, it might be because there’s a BBC game called Only Connect that operates very similarly, as some outlets groused upon Connections’ unveiling. The challenge comes when you don’t see any patterns right away, which sometimes happens, or you spot a word that might fit in multiple categories-for example, a board recently included the word “rock,” and the player might have initially thought it fit into the same category as “blues” and “country,” which were also on the grid, until they noticed that “paper,” “scissors,” and “shoot” were on the grid that day, too. The player is told to find groups of four words that fit together-you’re supposed to select the four words in front of you that have a commonality, like that they’re all names for pasta shapes, or cuts of beef. So I’m as surprised as anyone to be registering the following complaint about Connections, the New York Times’ newest game: It’s too easy.Ĭonnections, which debuted last month, presents players with a four-by-four grid of gray rectangles, each enclosing a different word. I got so upset the first time I lost Wordle that I wrote a whole piece about it. I can barely make it through a Wednesday crossword. Spelling Bee has never failed to humble me.
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