The New York Times has taken its addictive Connections format and pointed it squarely at sports fans, and the result is a puzzle that rewards trivia depth just as much as pattern recognition.
Launched in partnership with The Athletic, the sports edition follows the same core rules as the original game. Sixteen words appear on the board, splitting into four hidden groups of four, and the challenge is spotting which words genuinely belong together rather than which ones simply look like they do. Categories can span anything from player nicknames to team histories to sports terminology, and the game deliberately plants overlapping words designed to bait you into the wrong grouping.
Each category carries a difficulty color, yellow for the easiest connection, followed by green, blue, and purple for the trickiest. Guess a full group correctly and those four words disappear from the board. Guess wrong, and it counts against a four-mistake limit before the puzzle ends entirely, so unlike the freeform browsing of the earlier Wordle-style games, there's real risk attached to guessing without confidence.
A genuinely useful feature here is the shuffle option, which rearranges the board layout without giving away any answers. It sounds minor, but visually regrouping the same 16 words can surface connections your eye missed when they were sitting in their original positions. Players who get stuck often benefit more from a shuffle and a short break than from guessing blind.
Like the standard Connections, the sports edition resets after midnight, meaning today's puzzle carries no clues into tomorrow's. If you're building a streak, the safest strategy is locking in the yellow category first before touching anything you're less sure about, since it costs you nothing in mistakes and often reveals structure that makes the harder colors easier to parse.