🧩 Connections
The basics
Sixteen tiles, four hidden groups of four, four mistakes allowed. Select four tiles and submit. A correct set locks into a coloured row and leaves the board.
Shuffle rearranges the tiles without penalty, and deselect clears your current pick. Neither costs you anything, so use them freely.
The one away signal
When you submit a set with exactly three tiles from the same group, the board tells you that you are one away. That is a genuinely valuable piece of information and it is worth spending a mistake to get it when you are torn between two candidates.
If you get a one away message, do not swap randomly. Work out which of your four tiles is the most obviously attached to a different theme, and replace that one.
Why the obvious group is a trap
Puzzles are built so that five or six words look like they belong to the same easy category. Exactly four of them do. The rest belong somewhere sneakier.
The safest first submission is the group you can name most precisely. Types of fish is a better first guess than things at the beach, because the precise category has fewer possible members.
A worked board
You spot BASS, TUNA, COD, SALMON and PIKE and think you have found fish. That is five tiles for four slots, so one of them is doing double duty.
BASS is also a sound, a guitar and a voice range. SALMON is also a colour. Rather than guessing, look at what else is on the board. If you can see JADE, OLIVE and MINT sitting there, SALMON is almost certainly the colour and your fish group is BASS, TUNA, COD and PIKE.
Tips worth remembering
- Name the category out loud before you submit. If you cannot name it in three words, it is probably not the intended group.
- Count your candidates. Five words that fit means one of them belongs elsewhere.
- Solve the weirdest group first when you can see it. The remaining tiles then sort themselves.
- Shuffle when you feel stuck. Seeing the words in a new arrangement genuinely helps break a fixed reading.