‘Connections’ January 23: Answers and Hints for Puzzle #592

Connections came into the world, thanks to some games masters at The New York Times.

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

The puzzle is edited by Wyna Liu who told Newsweek how she comes up with four new categories every day. Liu builds the games each week from ideas she sources through daily life experiences.

“Each board has to be made from scratch,” Liu said, adding that, when she sits down to the build the week’s games, 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 does a long time to fudge things and try different angles,” Liu added.

How to Play ‘Connections’

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

Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and the answers for Thursday’s puzzle are toward the end of the article, so scroll with caution.

Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and then purple. However, the puzzles are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep things interesting.

The uniting themes can come from a broad range of categories—anything from Halloween costumes to music genres.

If all four words are correctly placed into each set, those words will be removed from the board. Each incorrect guess counts toward the mistake tally. Up to four errors can be made before it is game over.

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