How to solve Connections: the four-category strategy
Sixteen words, four hidden groups and the traps the setters lay. The strategy for not burning guesses: start with the most rigid category and distrust the most obvious one.
Connections is deceptively simple to explain: sixteen words, four groups of four, find the groups. And it is deceptively hard to play, because the setter has deliberately placed words that fit into more than one group.
That is the whole game. Not the vocabulary, but resisting the urge to submit the first group that looks obvious.
The rule that changes your results: the obvious category is a trap
When you open the grid, you almost always spot a group straight away. Four fruits, four countries, four colours. That is exactly the category the setter wanted you to see, and it almost always has five or six candidates, not four.
Why: the standard way to build a good Connections is to pick a broad, easy category and then steal one or two of its words for a narrower one. If you see six fruits, two of them belong to another group, and until you know which, submitting four at random is throwing away a guess.
Practical rule: count the candidates before you submit. If you get more than four, do not submit. You know nothing yet.
Start with the most rigid category, not the easiest
Mentally rank the four categories you suspect by how many words in the language could belong to each:
- «Things you can do with a ball» → soft category, half the dictionary fits.
- «Words starting with SUB-» → rigid category, very little fits.
- «Anagrams of river names» → extremely rigid.
The rigid category is your entry point. If you find four words sharing a very specific formal trait — they start the same way, they all hide an animal inside, they are all abbreviations — those four are almost certainly a group, because it is extremely hard for a word to meet that trait by accident.
And the moment you submit a rigid group correctly, the twelve that remain get far easier: the soft categories solve themselves by elimination.
The four category types that keep coming back
Recognising them saves half the work:
1. Semantic. All from the same field: instruments, spices, professions. The most common and the softest.
2. Formal. They share something about the spelling or the sound: they start with the same syllable, they all have a double letter, they are all palindromes. Rigid, and usually the one that unlocks the game.
3. «___ + word» or «word + ___». They all form an expression with one shared word: time out, time zone, time table, big time… Very frequent and easy to miss, because the four words have nothing to do with each other until you spot the one that joins them.
4. Homonyms and double meanings. They are all something else as well as what they look like: BANK, SPRING, BAT, MATCH, SEAL. When the grid holds two or three clearly polysemous words, suspect that the hard category is there.
When two groups fight over a word
This is the central situation of the game. You have five fruits for four slots.
What works is looking for the spare word somewhere else. Look at the remaining twelve and ask which of those five fruits would fit one of the other categories you suspect. If DATE can be a fruit but also belongs with calendar words, or with words for a romantic evening… there is your answer: DATE is not in the fruit group.
You almost never solve this by staring at the group in conflict. You solve it by looking at the other three.
And if you see absolutely nothing
Three resources, in order:
- Read the sixteen words out loud. It sounds silly and it works: formal categories and double-meaning ones are heard better than they are read.
- Look for the odd word out. The word that has no business being in the grid is usually the key to the hard category. Ask yourself what on earth it is doing there.
- Group in threes. Instead of looking for four, look for solid trios. Then ask which of the thirteen remaining completes each trio. It is far easier than attacking all four at once.
The mistake that costs the most games
Submitting a group you are «fairly sure» about. In Connections the guesses are the scarce resource, and an 80 % group is not good enough: there is an enormous difference between knowing and believing.
If you have doubts, give the other twelve words another minute. Certainty about one group almost always comes from having understood another.
Practising without waiting for tomorrow's
In MenteBrillante Connections is one of the fifteen puzzles, with a new challenge every day and a training mode for playing several in a row when you want real practice. Free in the browser.
And if the word genre is your thing, anagrams and crosswords train the same muscle by another route.