New NYT Connections Game for Sports Fans Lets Players Swing for the Fences

So maybe you're an avid player of The New York Times game Connections, but you're also a sports-trivia buff. Now, you can combine your two loves with Connections: Sports Edition, a new game from The Athletic, the paper's subscription-based sports section.

The new game looks a lot like regular Connections. CNET has hints for that game, plus daily answers for Connections as well as Wordle, Strands and the New York Times Mini Crossword. In both regular Connections and Connections: Sports Edition, a player is faced with 16 words and must group them into groups of four. 

The tough part is finding the proper connection -- hence the name -- that ties four words together. Words can fit into more than one group, but there's only one answer in which the 16 words all can be divided into groups of four. (In other words, your first inclination might not be the right answer -- look around and see what other options exist.)

Read more: Daily Puzzle Answers for Connections, Wordle, Strands and the NYT Mini Crossword

The words might include player names, or sports, or team names. You'll have to know a little bit about a lot of different sports and athletes to ace the puzzle on a regular basis. The Times provides daily hints on another page called Connections: Sports Edition Coach, but don't click through if you don't want game spoilers.

As Connections fans know, the four groups of words have different difficulty levels, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group. You won't know which color group is which until you solve the puzzle. And the words are often intentionally ambiguous: In today's puzzle (shown above), for example, you might expect "crew" to relate to words like "sail" and "kayak," but I'd urge you to hesitate before hitting that submit button.

For now, the game is in beta, which means the Times is testing it out to see if it's popular before adding it to the site's Games app. You can play it daily for the next few weeks for free -- and then we'll have to see if it sticks around. Knowing how popular the original Connections is and how many sports fans are out there, I'd bet on it hitting a home run.