Question 1

How do you play Connect?

Accepted Answer

Sixteen words are on the board and they fall into four groups of four. Pick four you think belong together and submit. Get it right and the group lifts off the board with its theme revealed; get it wrong and you lose one of four guesses.

Question 2

Is this free? Do I need an account?

Accepted Answer

Free, no account, no download, and unlimited — there is no one-a-day wait here.

Question 3

Can a word belong to two groups?

Accepted Answer

Never. Every word belongs to exactly one group — but several will look like they belong somewhere else, and that is the entire game. JAGUAR sits with car models while LION and LYNX sit with big cats.

Question 4

What does "one away" mean?

Accepted Answer

Three of your four are in the same group. It is the state this game lives in, and saying only "wrong" there would throw away information you have genuinely earned — so the near miss is named, and your selection stays on screen to be edited.

Question 5

What do the colours mean?

Accepted Answer

Difficulty, easiest to hardest: yellow, green, blue, purple. The hardest group is usually the one whose connection is a property of the words themselves rather than of the things they name.

Question 6

How should I start?

Accepted Answer

Look for the group you are surest of, then count. If you can see five plausible members of a category, one of them belongs elsewhere and finding which is usually the key to the whole puzzle.

Question 7

Why do I keep getting one away?

Accepted Answer

Because the puzzle is built that way. The extra word is nearly always the trap — a word that reads as your group but is needed by a harder one. Try swapping the least essential member for something you have been ignoring.

Question 8

How many mistakes do I get?

Accepted Answer

Four. On the fifth wrong guess the puzzle ends and the groups are revealed.

Question 9

Can I submit the same four twice?

Accepted Answer

No, and it does not cost you a guess — repeating a set you have already tried is refused rather than penalised.

Question 10

What does shuffle do?

Accepted Answer

Rearranges the board without changing anything. It genuinely helps: the grid position of a word shapes which other words you consider next to it, and breaking that is often enough to see the group.

Question 11

Are the puzzles generated?

Accepted Answer

No, and they cannot be. Every other word game here builds its content from a dictionary, because "is this a word" is a question a list can answer. This one asks whether four things share an idea, which a list cannot answer at all — a generated grouping is instantly recognisable, because the joins are either trivial or nonsense.

Question 12

How many puzzles are there?

Accepted Answer

15, each written and checked by hand, and each with at least one deliberate trap. The count is small because the craft is in the overlap, not the volume.

Question 13

Is it the same puzzle for everyone?

Accepted Answer

Only by number. There is no daily puzzle — play as many as you like, in any order.

Question 14

Can I replay the same puzzle?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every puzzle has a number and the same number always produces the same puzzle, so you can hand somebody the link and compare.

Question 15

Does the order I solve the groups in matter?

Accepted Answer

Not for scoring, but solving the easy ones first makes the rest easier: every word removed is a word that cannot confuse the group you are still hunting.

Question 16

What if I solve it with no mistakes?

Accepted Answer

The result says so. There is no streak and nothing to lose — the record is just what the board shows.

Question 17

Can I see the answers?

Accepted Answer

They are revealed when you run out of guesses, in difficulty order with each theme named.

Question 18

Why are some groups so hard?

Accepted Answer

Because the connection is about the words rather than their meanings — a shared hidden word, a homophone, a category you would never think of until you see it. That is the purple group, and it is meant to be the last one you get.

Question 19

Does it work on a phone?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The grid stays four across at every size and long words shrink to fit rather than breaking the shape, because a 4×4 grid of equal tiles is what this game looks like.

Question 20

Is this the same as the New York Times game?

Accepted Answer

It is the same format, which is an old party-game idea, with our own puzzles. Nothing here is taken from anyone else’s archive.

Question 21

Any advice for the last two groups?

Accepted Answer

Stop looking for meaning and start looking at the words. By that point the remaining eight usually split on something formal — length, a hidden word, a sound — rather than on a topic.