Associations

Associations is a connection-style word puzzle, the kind that's become hugely popular over the last few years. Sixteen words appear on a grid. They split into four hidden categories of four words each, and your job is to find all four groups. You get four wrong guesses before you lose.

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

Strategy. Read all sixteen tiles before you guess anything. Find the most obvious group first, but don't submit it right away. Ask yourself which of those four words is most likely to be the trap. Usually it's the one with the most other plausible meanings. Set aside anything you're unsure of and start with the cluster you're most confident doesn't overlap with anything else. Yellow is usually the hardest of the four categories and purple is usually a pun or wordplay. Blue and green tend to be the most literal.

When you're down to eight tiles and still unsure, look for unusual words. A word that could only fit 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 write every puzzle by hand, including the categories and the misdirection traps, and the grids in the game went through several rounds of playtesting. Early versions were too easy because the categories were too literal, so in later batches we leaned harder on shared-letter and hidden-meaning categories. The hardest category we've shipped so far was a group of four words that, with one letter changed in each, turned into four other words with a different theme in common. Josie figured it out in three guesses. I lost.

If you're playing to get better rather than to win, try deliberately submitting your least confident group first, before you spend 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.

For other word games here, there's Word Vault (guess a single five-letter word) and Cowboy Hangman.