How to solve connections puzzles: tips for word-grouping games

To solve a connections-style puzzle, look for the red herrings before you look for the groups: find the words that could belong to more than one category, and save your first guess for the group that has no overlap at all. Below are the techniques that help most, written for Quartets, our own daily word-grouping game, but useful for any puzzle of this kind.

What a connections puzzle is

The format is simple. You are given sixteen words and told that they fall into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a connection: it might be a category (types of cheese), a phrase (words that go before “ball”), or something sneakier (words that hide an animal). Your job is to find all four groups.

The best-known example is the New York Times game Connections, which made the format popular. Quartets is our own take on the same idea, with its own hand-written puzzles; it is not connected to or endorsed by the Times.

How Quartets works

• Sixteen words, four groups of four. Pick four words you think belong together and submit them.
• Four mistakes allowed. A correct group locks to the top of the board with its connection shown. A wrong one costs you one of your four mistakes.
• “One away”. If three of the four words you picked belong to the same group, you are told so. It is a strong clue, and it tells you exactly how close you were.
• Repeats are free. Submit a set of four you have already tried and you are simply told; no mistake is counted.
• Colours show difficulty. Each solved group is coloured by how hard it was meant to be, from the one you see first to the one doing the hiding.
• You always see the answers. If you run out of mistakes, every connection is revealed with a short note explaining it. You leave knowing them either way.

There is one new puzzle a day, the same for everyone, and your result can be shared as a spoiler-free grid of colours.

Tips for solving connections puzzles

1. Read all sixteen before touching anything

It is tempting to spot four matching words and submit straight away. Resist it. Read every word once, slowly, and say each one in your head. Only when you have the whole board in mind can you see which words have more than one possible home.

2. Assume there is a trap

A good connections puzzle almost always has at least one false group: five or six words that seem to share a connection when only four of them actually do. If you can immediately see five fruits, that is not a lucky break — it is the puzzle. One of those fruits belongs somewhere else, and working out which is usually the key to the board.

3. Look for the words that only fit one place

Rather than hunting for a group, look for a single word that can only mean one thing. An unusual word with one obvious sense anchors its group, and helps you decide which of the tempting candidates are the real members.

4. Think about words as words, not just as things

The hardest group is often not about meaning at all. Try each of these lenses on the words that are left over:

• Hidden words: does each one contain a smaller word, such as a body part or a colour?
• Compound words and phrases: can they all go before or after the same word?
• Sound: are they homophones, or do they rhyme?
• Spelling: are they anagrams, or all the same word with one letter changed?
• Second meanings: is a common word also a verb, a brand, a name or a piece of jargon?

5. Solve by elimination

You do not have to find the hardest group at all. If you get the three easier ones, the last four words are whatever is left. That is why it often pays to go for the most certain group first: every group you lock in removes four words from the board and makes the traps easier to see.

6. Use your mistakes deliberately

With four mistakes to spend, a wrong guess is not a disaster — it is information. If you are torn between two candidates for a group, guess with the one you think more likely. A “one away” tells you three of your four are right, which narrows the swap to a single word. A plain “wrong” with no hint usually means at least two of your four are off, which is just as useful.

7. Shuffle when you are stuck

Once a false grouping has lodged in your mind, it is hard to see past it, especially when the words sit next to each other. The shuffle button moves the words about without changing anything else. A fresh arrangement often makes a hidden connection jump out.

8. Say the category out loud

Before you submit, try to name the connection precisely. “Things that are sort of red” is a feeling; “shades of red” is a category you can test each word against. If you cannot phrase it cleanly, you may have four words that merely feel similar, which is exactly what a trap is designed to produce.

A worked example

Suppose some of your sixteen words are APPLE, ORANGE, LEMON, LIME, PLUM, SALMON, ROSE and MINT. Five fruits leap out. But ORANGE, LIME, PLUM, SALMON, ROSE and MINT are also all colours.

Now the question is which words fit only one group. APPLE and LEMON are not colours in everyday use, so they are almost certainly fruit. SALMON, ROSE and MINT are not fruit, so they are almost certainly colours. That leaves ORANGE, LIME and PLUM to be split between the two — and the rest of the board will usually decide it. Perhaps one of them is also needed by a third group entirely. That is how a good puzzle is built, and that is how you take one apart.

Common mistakes

• Submitting the first group you see. The most obvious group is often the trap.
• Forgetting the number is exactly four. If you have five candidates, one is wrong. If you have three, you are missing one.
• Ignoring the leftovers. The words that fit nowhere obvious are often the hardest group, waiting to be seen from a different angle.

Where to go next

If you like word puzzles that reward lateral thinking, you will probably enjoy the daily word too, and our round-up of word games for adults has more ideas. For something closer to a one-off riddle, try our brain teasers with answers.