Associations

Associations is our take on the connection-style word puzzles that have become hugely popular over the last few years. The format is simple: sixteen words appear on a grid. Four of them belong together. Four more belong together. And so on — four hidden categories, four words each. Your job is to find them. You get four wrong guesses before you lose.

What makes the puzzle hard is that the categories are usually carefully designed to look like other categories. There might be four animal names — but one of them is actually in the "things on a baseball field" group (THE PITCHER is also a kind of jug). There might be four words that all start with the same letter — but the actual hidden theme is something else entirely. The puzzle author wants you to find the obvious red-herring grouping and submit it, costing you a life.

Strategy. Read all sixteen tiles before you guess anything. Find the most obvious group first — but instead of submitting it immediately, ask yourself: which one of these four is the most likely "trap"? The one that has the most other plausible meanings is usually the misdirection. Set aside what you're unsure of and start with the cluster you're most confident has no overlap. The yellow category is usually the hardest of the four; the purple is usually a pun or wordplay; the blue and green are typically the most literal.

When you're down to eight tiles and unsure, look for unusual words. Anything that looks like it could only belong to one category is your friend. If you see RUTABAGA on the board, it's almost certainly in the "root vegetables" group and nowhere else.

Build notes. We hand-author each puzzle, including the categories and the misdirection traps. The grids that ship in the game went through several rounds of playtesting — early versions were too easy because the categories were too literal; we leaned harder on shared-letter and hidden-meaning categories in later batches. The hardest category we've shipped so far was a group of four words that, with one letter changed, became four other words sharing a different theme. Josie figured it out in three guesses; I lost.

If you like this kind of puzzle, try our Wurdle for single-word guessing or Cowboy Hangman for the classic letter-by-letter format.

The fastest way to improve is to deliberately submit your least confident group first, before you commit a life on a group you're sure of. It feels backwards but it works. You learn more from the puzzle in three moves than you would in five.