Connections invented by game masters at New York Times who was tasked with putting together a new daily puzzle for the newspaper’s website.

They put their brains together in an annual brainstorming session and Connections was born in 2021.

The daily task of editing the hit puzzle is Wyna Liu’s job revealed to Newsweek how she comes up with four new categories every day.

She builds the seven daily games every week herself based on ideas she gets through daily life experiences. To keep track of her inspiration, Liu keeps a neat spreadsheet with her theme or word ideas, but a notebook is never far away when inspiration strikes her.

“Each board has to be made from scratch,” she said, explaining that when she sits down to build that week’s game, she’ll consult her notebook and spreadsheet, which is like a “digital sketchpad.”

“I usually don’t know where a board is going to go. It really takes a long time to cheat things and try different angles.”

How to play “Connections”

The brain teaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, one game linked the words “clear,” “earn,” “make,” and “net,” all of which came under the category of “take home, as income.”

Instructions on how to play the game are below. The clues and answers for Thursday’s puzzle are towards the end of the article, so scroll carefully.

Each of the four categories is marked with a color, which also indicates their level of difficulty. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and then purple. But the puzzles are rarely simple, using homophones and puns, among other techniques, to keep things interesting.

The unifying themes can come from a wide range of categories – everything from Halloween costumes to music genres.

If all four words are correctly placed in each set, those words will be removed from the board. Each wrong guess counts towards the error count. Up to four mistakes can be made before the game is over.

Players can shuffle and rearrange the board if they want to try to make the process of guessing the connections easier. To make it a little tougher, a word can sometimes belong to more than one category — but there is only one correct answer.

‘Connections’ #431 Clues for Thursday, August 15th

Newsweek are here with some tips to help you identify today’s Connections categories.

Yellow: These words mean span.

Green: These can mean husband.

Blue: Simple names for some popular ales.

Purple: Words that follow another three-letter word beginning with ‘p’.

‘Connections’ #431 Answers for Thursday, August 15th

Yellow Category: WIDTH

Yellow words: Extent, scope, scope, scope

Green Category: SECOND HALF

Green words: Complement, match, mate, partner

Blue Category: BEER, FAMILY

Blue words: Bud, Natty, Sierra, Stella

Purple Category: WORDS AFTER “PAY”

Purple words: Check, Dirt, Pal, Phone

Well, that was fun! Did you figure out the answer? If so, congratulations, but don’t be put off playing if not. Practice makes perfect, and the next Connections puzzle is published on Friday.

Connections released at midnight in your local time zone, and Newsweek will be back tomorrow with another round of tips and advice.

If you can’t wait, why not try these others popular online word puzzle games?