NYT Has a New Connections Game for Sports Fans. I Tried It

3 weeks ago 7

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, players face off against 16 words and must sort 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 options exist.)

The words might include player names, team names or sport-related activities. 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.

I tried it

I might be the ideal player for Connections. I know a little bit about many aspects of sports, but I can't go too deep on many of them. (I mean, unless the Times installs a category of 1980s Minnesota North Stars, or one for Devastating Minnesota Vikings Defeats. THEN I WILL BEAT EVERYONE.)

I gave the Oct. 9 puzzle a spin, so if you don't want spoilers for that day's puzzle, don't read further.

I started spotting golf clubs right away -- it seemed like "putter" could be in only one category. But my first guess of "putter," "driver," "wedge" and "wood" was wrong -- the game told me I was "one away," meaning one of my answers was incorrect. Of my four guesses, "wood" seemed the most flexible, so I removed that once I spotted "iron." Yep, "putter," "driver," "wedge" and "iron" were all grouped together in the "golf clubs" category.

I'm a big fan of college bowl games and their sometimes goofy names. (RIP, Beef O'Brady's Bowl.) So when words that I knew to be bowl-game names started jumping out at me, I went that route. Again, there were five words that seemed to fit -- "peach," "rose," "fiesta," "cotton" and "sugar." On a hunch, I skipped my favorite bowl, "rose," thinking that word could be used here as someone's name or in another way. I was right! "Cotton," "fiesta," "peach" and "sugar" earned me my second correct category, "____ bowl."

I was surprised to see this category labeled in purple, which is the toughest category. Bowl games are hard to guess?

The names, like "Megan," were calling to me, but more than that, I was spotting what seemed to be a pattern of surfaces. I picked "ice," "turf," "wood" and "grass," figuring all of those were things on which where sports were played. I was right! I'd completed the green category: "playing surfaces."

Now I was golden. The remaining four words had to go together, and they were "Rose," "Carli," "Megan" and "Mia" (or, MIA? I was thinking of the singer who goes by MIA and flipped the bird at the 2012 Super Bowl). I didn't need to know how the four names were connected, I just needed to tap on them all. I did, and the game informed me that they were all first names of USWNT stars, meaning stars of the United States women's national soccer team. (Megan Rapinoe, Rose Lavelle, Carli Lloyd and Mia Hamm are my guesses.)

Part of the fun of Sports Connections and its OG game, Connections, is that you get that little freebie category at the end. I was surprised, though, that I was able to get the other three categories so quickly, and I've decided to work Connections: Sports Edition into my daily game routine. Play ball!

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