The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Sunday's edition of The New York Times' Connections puzzle sent players through electrical terminology, digital slang, bathroom fixtures and a tricky wordplay category built around facial expressions, delivering what many players rated as one of the tougher boards of the week.

Connections challenges players to sort 16 words or phrases into four hidden groups of four, with each group tied to a shared theme. The categories are ranked by difficulty and color-coded accordingly, running from yellow for the most straightforward group to purple for the trickiest, which frequently leans on wordplay, hidden patterns or double meanings. Players are allowed four total mistakes before the puzzle ends, and the daily game continues to rank among the Times' most popular digital offerings alongside Wordle.

Sunday's yellow group, the day's easiest category, centered on components of an electrical circuit: BREAKER, FUSE, RELAY and SWITCH. Each term describes a distinct piece of hardware involved in controlling or protecting the flow of electrical current, from a circuit breaker that interrupts power during an overload to a switch that opens or closes a circuit manually.

The green group asked players to identify digital coupling verbs: CONNECT, JOIN, PAIR and SYNC. Each word describes the act of linking two devices, accounts or pieces of technology together, a category that reflects increasingly common tech vocabulary from Bluetooth pairing to account syncing across platforms. Several solvers reported briefly grouping FUSE into this category as well, given that fusing two things together could plausibly be read as another coupling verb, before recognizing that FUSE more properly belonged among the yellow group's circuit components.

Moving into the blue category, the puzzle's third-hardest group, Sunday's theme centered on things toilets do: DRAIN, FLUSH, REFILL and SWIRL. Each word describes a distinct stage or action within a standard toilet's operating cycle, from the swirling motion of water during a flush to the tank refilling itself afterward. Commentators covering the puzzle noted this category proved to be one of the more elusive groupings of the day, since each individual word carries several other plausible meanings outside the bathroom-specific context the puzzle intended.

The purple group, traditionally the day's most difficult and prone to misdirection, asked players to identify words that could each follow a blank to form a facial expression: GAME, LONG, POKER and STRAIGHT. Adding "face" after each word produces a familiar phrase: game face, long face, poker face and straight face. One player detailing their solving process online said the connection clicked immediately upon seeing POKER, which brought to mind Lady Gaga's debut hit "Poker Face," before GAME and STRAIGHT followed naturally, along with LONG, tied to the familiar bar joke about a horse being asked why it has such a long face.

Puzzle trackers following Sunday's board noted several deliberate red herrings built into the grid, designed to nudge solvers toward incorrect groupings before the true categories became clear. The overlap between FUSE fitting both the circuit-components and digital-coupling themes, along with the multiple plausible meanings behind several of the toilet-related words, made Sunday's puzzle a notably tricky solve even for experienced players. One columnist covering the puzzle for TechRadar rated the day's difficulty as "hard" and reported finishing with a single mistake, made by initially placing FUSE in the digital coupling group before recognizing the more fitting circuit-components category.

For players working through the puzzle without hints, general strategy guidance suggests beginning with the most straightforward, tightly defined categories, such as Sunday's electrical-components yellow group, before moving on to categories requiring lateral thinking or wordplay recognition, such as the purple group's hidden "face" pattern. Players are also encouraged to watch for words that plausibly fit more than one category, a hallmark of Connections' design that becomes especially relevant once the easier groups have already been solved. The game's "one away" feature, which alerts players when three of their four selected words belong to the same group, can also serve as a useful tool for refining guesses without immediately triggering a mistake.

Sunday's puzzle continued a run of thematically varied boards throughout the week, following Saturday's grid, which grouped ways to commit a basketball violation, words meaning belief, elements tracked in video games, and words that follow "pop." That board included CARRY, DOUBLE DRIBBLE, GOALTEND and TRAVEL in its basketball-violation yellow group; ATTITUDE, MIND, OPINION and VIEW in its belief-themed green group; HEALTH, LIVES, SCORE and TIME in its video-game blue group; and CULTURE, FLY, QUIZ and TART in its "pop"-themed purple group.

The complete answers for Sunday, July 19, puzzle number 1,134, are as follows: the yellow group, tied to circuit components, includes BREAKER, FUSE, RELAY and SWITCH; the green group, built around digital coupling verbs, includes CONNECT, JOIN, PAIR and SYNC; the blue group, centered on things toilets do, includes DRAIN, FLUSH, REFILL and SWIRL; and the purple group, built around words that precede "face" to form an expression, includes GAME, LONG, POKER and STRAIGHT.

Connections has built a devoted daily following since its 2023 debut by combining accessible mechanics with puzzles that consistently reward pattern recognition and careful reading over quick guessing, a formula that has helped the game rival Wordle in daily engagement even as it demands a different style of reasoning from players. The game is available daily alongside the Times' broader puzzle lineup, including Wordle, Strands, the traditional Crossword, Letter Boxed and Sudoku, with a new Connections board set to go live at midnight local time for players looking to keep their streaks intact heading into the new week.

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