The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Puzzle players looking for Wednesday's Connections solution have a golf-and-skin-conditions grid to untangle, with a hidden musical trap waiting for anyone who moves too fast.

Connections, The New York Times' daily word-association game, asks players to sort 16 words into four hidden groups of four. Each group carries its own difficulty level, color-coded from easiest to hardest: yellow, green, blue and purple. Players get four mistakes before the puzzle locks them out, and a "one away" prompt appears when a guessed group is close but not quite right.

Wednesday's edition, puzzle number 1,137, features a set of overlapping categories that several outlets flagged as trickier than usual, thanks to a handful of words that plausibly belong in more than one group.

Here are the four categories for July 22:

The yellow group, typically the most straightforward of the four, was built around symptoms of an allergic reaction. The words HIVES, ITCHING, RASH and REDNESS fit together under that theme, with hives referring to raised red bumps on the skin and rash describing a broader outbreak of spots rather than raised welts.

The green group centered on golf scoring, grouping HOLE, PAR, SCORE and STROKES. In golf terminology, par represents the expected number of strokes a skilled player needs to complete a hole, while a player's overall score reflects how their strokes compare to par across a round.

The blue group, titled "platform-specific posts," gathered PINS, SNAPS, TWEETS and VINES — four terms tied to specific social media platforms. Pins refer to Pinterest, snaps to Snapchat, and tweets to the posts once associated with Twitter before the platform's rebrand to X. Vines referenced the short-form video app Vine, which let users post looping clips of six seconds or less before Twitter shut the service down in 2017. A modern successor to that format, called Divine, launched earlier this year.

The purple group, usually the puzzle's hardest and most conceptual, focused on physical features of a zebra: HOOVES, MANE, TAIL and WHITE STRIPES.

Why this puzzle tripped some players up

Several solvers and puzzle columnists pointed out a red herring buried in the grid. HIVES, STROKES and WHITE STRIPES are also the names of alt-rock bands from a similar musical era, alongside acts like The Vines — which shares its name with the blue category's answer. That overlap led some players to try grouping those words together as a band-themed category, only to come up one word short and mistakenly reach for HOLE, the 1990s rock band fronted by Courtney Love, to complete the set.

That instinct made for a satisfying red herring but was ultimately a trap: HOLE belonged with the golf terms, not the musical acts, and the actual "bands" theme never existed as a category at all. It was simply a coincidental overlap between two unrelated word groups, exactly the kind of misdirection Connections is designed to create.

How the puzzle generally works

Connections has become one of the Times' most popular daily games since its official launch in 2023, building on the success of Wordle, which the paper acquired the year before. Unlike Wordle's single daily answer, Connections rewards players who can spot conceptual links between words that appear unrelated at first glance — a format that has made it a fixture of morning routines and office chat threads alike.

Puzzle strategy generally favors locking in the group a player feels most confident about first, since an incorrect guess in Connections costs a life regardless of which category it targets. Solvers who study the full grid for words that could fit multiple categories, rather than locking in early hunches, tend to avoid the kind of mistake produced by Wednesday's alt-rock decoy.

The Times releases a new Connections puzzle at midnight local time in each time zone, meaning players around the world are often working through different puzzles depending on when they log in. The paper also publishes spinoff versions of the format, including a Sports Edition that ran its own themed grid the same day, built around golf and other athletic vocabulary.

Where to find today's puzzle

Connections is free to play on the Times Games website and mobile app, alongside other no-cost puzzles including Wordle, Strands, Pips and Sudoku. Other Times games, such as the daily crossword, Letter Boxed and Tiles, require a Games subscription.

For players who want to track their performance over time, the app displays win streaks and mistake counts, encouraging the kind of daily habit that has turned puzzles like Connections and Wordle into recurring cultural moments, complete with players comparing results and swapping hints on social media each morning.

Wednesday's puzzle offered a reminder of how the format continues to reward careful reading over quick pattern-matching. A grid built around allergy symptoms, golf scoring, social media terms and zebra anatomy sounds simple in isolation, but the presence of overlapping band names shows how the Times' puzzle editors continue to build in traps for players who move too quickly through the board.

Players hoping to keep their streaks alive can expect a new Connections puzzle to publish at midnight Thursday, with a fresh set of categories and, likely, a new set of red herrings designed to catch even experienced solvers off guard.

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