The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

NEW YORK — Monday's edition of The New York Times' Connections puzzle sent players hunting through overlapping categories tied to shipping tickets, invoices and facial hair, in a grid that puzzle columnists described as leaning harder on wordplay than straightforward vocabulary.

Connections, published daily by the Times as part of its expanding suite of word games, presents 16 words or phrases that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a common theme, and the puzzle is color-coded by difficulty, with yellow generally representing the most straightforward category and purple the most challenging. Players are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends, and, unlike Wordle, there is no penalty tied to the number of guesses used within that limit.

Monday's puzzle, numbered 1156, grouped its 16 entries into four categories: words and phrases meaning "haphazardly," ways to receive event tickets, sections commonly found on an invoice, and a category built around famous goatees.

The yellow group, typically the easiest of the four, was built around phrases meaning "in a disorganized or random way." It included "any old how," "at random," "helter-skelter" and "willy-nilly" — four expressions that all describe a lack of order or plan, though their varying phrasing led some players to initially sort them into unrelated groups before recognizing the shared theme.

The second category asked players to identify ways to receive tickets to an event, grouping "mail delivery," "mobile ticket," "print-at-home" and "will call." Puzzle commentators noted that this category required players to think beyond the physical tickets themselves and focus instead on the method of delivery, a distinction that tripped up some solvers who initially grouped ticket-related terms by venue type or event category instead.

The third group centered on sections commonly found on an invoice, pulling together "balance due," "bill to," "order number" and "unit price." This category proved to be a common stumbling block for players unfamiliar with standard invoice formatting, since several of the terms could plausibly fit into other business or finance-themed groupings elsewhere in the puzzle.

The fourth and most difficult category, marked purple, asked players to identify famous goatees, linking "billy goat," "Colonel Sanders," "Doctor Strange" and "the devil" under a single, more abstract theme. One puzzle columnist who writes a regular Connections hints column for a technology outlet described the process of untangling that group by recalling a children's nursery rhyme, saying the key to spotting the connection was thinking of the phrase "not by the hair on my chinny chin-chin," which led to picturing Colonel Sanders' well-known white facial hair before connecting the rest of the group.

Connections has become one of the most closely watched entries in the Times' games lineup since its wider rollout, following the runaway success of Wordle, which the Times acquired in early 2022. The puzzle rewards lateral thinking over straightforward vocabulary knowledge, since individual words can often plausibly belong to more than one category, a design choice intended to create red herrings that complicate early guesses. Puzzle strategists commonly recommend that players first scan the full grid for words that seem to fit a category with unusual confidence, then hold off on submitting a guess until they can also account for the remaining twelve words logically fitting into the other three groups.

Monday's puzzle arrived alongside the Times' newer Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff produced in partnership with The Athletic that applies the same grouping format to sports-specific terminology. That edition's puzzle for August 10 focused on categories tied to tennis scoring, baseball fundamentals, football team leadership and types of protective gear, according to hint columns published Monday. The sports spinoff has expanded the Connections format to a new audience of sports-focused puzzle fans since its debut, running alongside the standard puzzle each day rather than replacing it.

The Times does not disclose internal difficulty ratings for individual Connections puzzles, but outlets that publish daily hint columns generally rank each day's difficulty based on reader feedback and the pattern of mistakes commonly reported by solvers. Monday's puzzle was described by several of those columns as moderately challenging, with the purple goatee-themed category singled out as the primary source of difficulty given its reliance on visual recognition and pop-culture familiarity rather than a straightforward dictionary definition.

Connections is part of a broader daily routine for millions of puzzle enthusiasts who also complete Wordle, the Mini Crossword and Strands each morning, all of which reset at midnight in each player's local time zone. The four games have become a fixture of the Times' digital subscription strategy, with the company regularly citing engagement with its games portfolio as a driver of subscriber growth in its quarterly earnings reports.

Players who missed Monday's puzzle or want to revisit past solutions can access the Connections archive through the Times' Games app for subscribers with All Access or Games-specific subscriptions, which allow access to every previous day's puzzle. A new Connections puzzle, along with a new Connections: Sports Edition, Wordle and Mini Crossword, will be published at midnight Tuesday.

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