connections – Dickens of a Blog

While I play around on several games on NYTimes, the game that I most enjoy remains Connections. And today, Connections hit the milestone of 1000 Puzzles [of which I seem to have played 587].

I was curious how they were going to celebrate, and we got a cute little message and a unique object:

Didn’t have too much trouble beating and getting the Reverse Rainbow [Purple, Blue, Green, Yellow in that order]: solving from hardest to easy category. To be honest, though, I just went for a category with the cute little Connections icon. It just happened to be, well, I guess already spoiled it: Purple.

All in all, the growing bloat and badges and all that are starting to detract from me enjoying even the regular rotation of NYT Games, but’s been fun playing this for the past year or two.

Even if I don’t make it to 2000 [or 1300, at this rate], just wanted to swing by and say “congrats” to the team behind it.

It’s been one of the better ones.

Kaz and I both enjoy playing New York Times’s Connections. It is a nice puzzle for me to solve each morning. However, I have been a bit irked at how much it obviously borrows from Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall.”

While I appreciate you cannot copyright gameplay algorithms and mechanics [we’ll leave the idea of Nintendo having a patent on fall damage for a later date], the fact that a “homage” to Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall” was called Connections is perhaps a bit on the nose. When the style of gameplay and three of the four colors are obviously in line (an image of a potentially actual (?) Connecting Wall , found on Wikipedia):

I had a bit of a smirk this morning when today (2025-10-27)’s Connections puzzle started with the following in-joke [it is semi frequent that a few fun messages like this are embedded]:

JUSTICE!

Obviously, I am being a bit cheeky but I found it very nice.

And to shout to the Connections team, I appreciate they have found a way to take the format and make the puzzles mostly approachable. Only Connect is the only game show I have ever seen that regularly leaves me feeling like a complete idiot. It’s that good.

I would not thrive in a Connecting Wall environment.

Credits

The image from Only Connect was taken from the Wikipedia article linked above and is credited as by Wdcf – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22950288.

The screenshot from Connections was taken by me. Featuring content from October 27, 2025’s Connections #869 by Wyna Liu.