Your Twitter/X and Facebook timelines are already filled with the green, yellow, and gray squares of obsessed Wordle players, but get ready to see a lot more of a different kind of box.
Connections, which has been increasingly popular with players since it went into beta last month, is becoming a full-fledged addition to the New York Times collection of puzzle games. Jonathan Knight, head of games at the Times, says you’ll be seeing better integration with other titles and new platforms on which to play (the game is currently only available on the web) in “weeks, not months.”
“The way we operate is we want to make lots of games quickly, get them out and see if people like them and not over-invest in that early phase,” Knight told Fast Company. “When we see traction, we then quickly do that extra work to make it part of our tech stack. I can confirm that we’ve made that commitment with Connections. It’s going to become part of our long-term portfolio of games.”
If you haven’t played yet, here’s how Connections works. Every day, a group of 16 words is refreshed. Your job is to find four groups of four that have a common theme. Some are easy. For instance, you’d probably quickly grasp that Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, and Oppenheimer fit together. But some are designed to trick you, as the words could seemingly fit into several categories. For example, would you immediately deduce that Handlebar, Horseshoe, Pencil, and Walrus were also types of mustaches?
Knight calls the game “our most editorially driven game since Spelling Bee,” another NYT game that tasks players to create words out of a collection of letters.
While it’s just making a splash now, Connections actually has a fairly long history with the Times. As far back as 2021, the company was thinking about a word association game, and the idea for its current incarnation grew out of an internal “game jam” that year. But the acquisition of Wordle in January 2022, for a “low-seven figures,” was an all-hands-on-deck event that put Connections on the back burner.
Once Wordle was running smoothly and the group began focusing on homemade games again, the NYT Games crew began to clear its pipeline, putting both Connections and a math-focused game Digits into beta release.
Connections, well, connected with players—whereas Digits found a niche group of fans, but hasn’t seen the same sort of success.
“We have certain success criteria,” says Knight. “We look at engagement. We look at metrics. We’re able to predict whether something will have the level of engagement and return rates that will make it a long-lasting puzzle that can contribute to our portfolio and to our business. I would say Connections is hitting or exceeding those success metrics. . . . We didn’t quite hit that bar with Digits, even though it has a beloved following. . . . Math might scare a lot of people off.”
While the game is (and will remain) free for now, the goal of Connections, like any content in the NYT, is to sell subscriptions. Even free games like Wordle help the Times build its digital business by capturing emails to retarget users with other marketing. Plus, for $5 per month (or $40 for a year), puzzle addicts can get access to the archive of daily games. Current subscribers of the publication can also upgrade their account to include the games archive as well.
The Times doesn’t release player numbers, but Knight says Connections has been the company’s most successful internal launch since Spelling Bee, which launched online in 2018 and debuted in the New York Times Magazine in 2014.
What makes it such a hit? Well, like Wordle, it has that addictive quality. And it’s a concept that’s basic enough that people can quickly figure out how to play. But the real hook, he feels, is the game’s human curation. Players might not necessarily know Wyna Liu’s name, the editor behind the Connections puzzle, but there’s still a relationship with her.
“When you have a puzzle that’s driven by an editor in that way, you have this almost two-player relationship where you’ve got a solver and the constructor,” says Knight. “And you know you’re up against a human every day that’s trying to trick you. So, you come back to try to beat the constructor. . . . That’s something this game does really, really well.”