The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Puzzle enthusiasts working through Saturday's New York Times Connections game have their answer: puzzle #1126, released July 11, 2026, sorted into four categories spanning circus equipment, calm water, "Toy Story" characters and a wordplay twist built around alphabetical letter positions, according to multiple outlets tracking the daily game.

The puzzle, one of the Times' fastest-growing daily offerings behind its flagship crossword, challenges players to sort 16 words into four hidden groups of four, with each group linked by a shared theme. Players select four words at a time and submit their guess, with the game flagging correct groupings by color and warning players when they are "one away" from a right answer. Four incorrect guesses end the game.

Saturday's yellow group, typically the easiest of the four categories, centered on circus equipment and included the words cannon, stilts, trapeze and unicycle. The green group, one level up in difficulty, was built around words describing undisturbed water, grouping calm, flat, glassy and still. The blue group asked players to identify "Toy Story" characters, linking Bo Peep, Jessie, Slinky and Woody, all figures from the animated film franchise.

The puzzle's purple group, traditionally its most difficult and often built on wordplay rather than straightforward categories, asked players to identify words containing double letters that appear in that letter's corresponding position in the alphabet. That group included aardvark, bocce, ebbing and twiddle, a category puzzle trackers described as more convoluted than necessary for an otherwise approachable board. One puzzle guide characterized Saturday's overall difficulty as fairly easy, noting the Times "went a bit over the top" with the purple category's complexity relative to the rest of the grid.

Connections was developed internally by the Times and rolled out widely in 2023 following a beta testing period, building on the success of Wordle, which the paper acquired in 2022. Since its launch, Connections has become a fixture of the Times' games section alongside titles including Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword, Sudoku and Pips, part of a broader push by the paper to build a subscription-driving suite of daily puzzles that keep readers returning to its platform.

The category names themselves are typically withheld from players at the outset of each puzzle, requiring them to infer the connecting theme from the words alone, which are presented in a scrambled four-by-four grid. Puzzle guides note that the game frequently uses overlapping or deceptive word choices designed to lure players into incorrect groupings, since certain words could plausibly fit into more than one category before the true theme becomes clear. That design has made the purple category, in particular, a recurring source of frustration and admiration among regular players, as it often hinges on subtler linguistic patterns rather than simple shared meaning.

Saturday's edition continued that tradition, with the double-letter alphabetical wordplay requiring players to recognize, for instance, that the double A in "aardvark" corresponds to the first position in the alphabet, while the double B in "bocce" corresponds to the second, and so on through the remaining words in the group. Puzzle trackers described the category as clever, if more demanding than the board's other three groupings.

Beyond the standard Connections puzzle, the Times has also expanded into sports-specific content through a partnership with The Athletic, its sports journalism subsidiary. Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff format that resets daily at midnight Eastern time alongside the main puzzle, asks players to group 16 sports-related terms into four themed categories tied to leagues, franchises, coaches and regional rivalries. Saturday's sports edition, puzzle #656, included categories built around West Coast football and one of baseball's more competitive divisions, according to puzzle guides tracking that edition separately from the main game.

For players who prefer to work through Connections without spoilers, most puzzle-tracking outlets offer graduated hint systems, typically presenting clues in order from the easiest category to the hardest, matching the game's own yellow-green-blue-purple difficulty scale. That structure allows players to seek partial help, such as a thematic nudge for the purple category alone, without revealing the full solution if they'd still like to solve the remaining groups independently.

Access to the daily Connections puzzle, along with Wordle and the Mini Crossword, remains free through the Times' games app and website, while access to the publication's full puzzle archive, including older Connections boards, requires a Times Games subscription. The paper has continued to invest in expanding that archive and its associated tools, including a statistics feature that tracks player performance over time, similar to the Wordle Bot analysis tool available for that game.

Saturday's puzzle followed Friday's edition, puzzle #1125, which puzzle guides also flagged as approachable, continuing a stretch of moderately difficult boards heading into the weekend. The Times typically varies puzzle difficulty across the week, with Mondays generally considered the easiest and puzzles growing progressively more challenging toward the weekend, though that pattern is not always consistent from week to week.

Connections has built a dedicated fan base since its debut, with players frequently sharing their results, minus the actual answers, on social media in a format similar to Wordle's shareable grid. That format allows players to display how many mistakes they made and in what order they solved each category, without spoiling the puzzle for others who haven't yet played. The game's continued popularity has also spurred a wave of independent puzzle guides and hint sites, many of which publish same-day breakdowns shortly after each puzzle's midnight release, catering to a mix of players who want quick verification and those looking for structured hints to solve the board themselves.

Sunday's Connections puzzle is set to reset at midnight Eastern time, continuing the game's daily rotation. Players looking for hints ahead of the next release can typically expect updated guides to appear within hours of each new puzzle going live, following the same category-by-category format used for Saturday's board.

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