A 1000 Days of Connections: A Brief History of the Puzzle That Made Links and Lateral Thinking Global.

On March 6, 2026, the New York Times published puzzle #1000 of Connections, a milestone the game marked with characteristic self-awareness. One of the day's four categories was literally "places where connections happen," with the game itself among the answers. A thousand days in, and it's still winking at you from the purple row.

If you play Connections, you know the ritual. Sixteen words. Four hidden groups of four. Yellow is warm, green is manageable, blue is tricky, purple is the one that makes you put your phone down and stare at the ceiling. You get four mistakes. You almost certainly use three of them.

The wall before the wall

Here's something the New York Times would rather not lead with: the format is not new. Those of us who have been quizzing (you can call us early adopters) know this.

Only Connect, the BBC quiz show hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell since 2008, has a round called the Connecting Wall. Teams receive a grid of sixteen clues and have two and a half minutes to sort them into four groups of four, with red herrings deliberately built in to make the obvious groupings wrong. It has been running on BBC Four and later BBC Two for over fifteen years. The show's title comes from E. M. Forster's 1910 novel Howards End and the programme treats that aspiration with genuine intellectual seriousness.

(It also helps that VCM, with her sharpish wit and looks, is a quizzer’s pin-up.)

When the NYT launched Connections in June 2023, the Only Connect community noticed immediately. Coren Mitchell herself tweeted about it, in a post that went semi-viral. The show's question writer Mike Turner offered his assistance. Former contestant Kat Brown pointed out she had appeared in the show's eighteenth series. The NYT's response was essentially: independently constructed, different mechanics, move on. And to be fair, the NYT version has its own distinct editorial voice. But the DNA is unmistakable.

If you want to play the original, the Connecting Wall round from actual episodes is accessible via BBC iPlayer, and the fan site PuzzGrid (more on that below) lets you play thousands of Only Connect-style walls any time.

Kennections and the deeper genealogy

In the USA, you’ll find Ken Jennings — Jeopardy! GOAT and now its host — who has been publishing a puzzle called Kennections since 2012, first in Parade magazine, then at Mental Floss, where it still runs weekly. The format is a cousin rather than a twin: you're given five trivia questions across different topics, you solve each one, and then you have to find what all five answers have in common. It sounds simple until you realise the common thread might be that they're all homophones for countries, or that they all contain a hidden number, or that they're the smallest of their respective kinds.

Jennings has said the tricky part of constructing a Kennections puzzle is that each answer must work as a standalone piece of trivia, and the hidden connection must be genuinely elegant rather than loose. He also mentioned, charmingly, that he plays NYT Connections with his wife over dinner, racing to see who spots the pattern first. His collected book, The Complete Kennections, was published in 2025. It’s a nice book, just too American, a problem for many of us with NYT Connections.

For completeness: the British game show simply called Connections aired in 1985 with presenter Sue Robbie, a lighter take on broadly the same idea. The format runs deep in quiz culture on both sides of the Atlantic.

How the NYT version actually came to be

The New York Times Games team runs an annual internal Game Jam — a brainstorming session where staff pitch ideas for new puzzles. Connections was conceived there, developed over the following year, and launched in beta on June 12, 2023.

The editor assigned to it was Wyna Liu, a puzzle editor at the Times since 2020, who had previously worked on crosswords but had no game of her own. She has described it with characteristic understatement: she was the only editor on the team without a game, they asked if she wanted to take this one, and she said "okay, sounds like fun." She has now constructed every single Connections board since launch — more than a thousand puzzles, each built from scratch in around two hours, each personally tested for balance and misdirection.

The game grew so fast after its beta launch that the team couldn't take it offline for planned improvements. It was doing too well to pause. Full mobile rollout came in August 2023; streak tracking arrived in September 2024. By the end of 2024, Connections had logged 3.3 billion plays, making it the Times' second-most-played game after Wordle.

What's playing now

Beyond the official NYT titles, here are the other connections-style puzzles worth bookmarking:

For the BBC original, search "Only Connect BBC". There’s also a book.

PuzzGrid — puzzgrid.com — Directly inspired by Only Connect's Connecting Wall. Timed (three minutes), thousands of user-submitted grids, considerably harder than the NYT version. If you've mastered yellow-through-purple and want to suffer productively, this is where you go.

Connections Archive — connections.swellgarfo.… — Every NYT puzzle since the beta launch, playable with unlimited mistakes. Also lets you build and share your own grids.

Kennections — mentalfloss.com/kennect… — Ken Jennings' weekly puzzle. Five trivia questions, one hidden link.

The puzzle #1000 arrived, was solved by millions, and by midnight had given way to puzzle #1001. The next round milestone is puzzle #1095 — three full years. Wyna Liu will almost certainly have built it herself, from scratch, in about two hours, with a category that nobody else on earth would have thought of.

Links to all games mentioned are listed above.