It’s been about 18 months since Wordle began appearing on my social media feeds, those green and yellow boxes asking for an explanation. I discussed Wordle variants soon after that. While I still play Wordle daily, the variants I play has shifted. I still play Daily Quordle, and its own variant Daily Sequence, which has four words that must be solved in order. While I enjoy Octordle (8 words) and Sedecordle (16 words!), I play on my phone, so managing 8 or 16 words was cumbersome.
Among the variants I’m enjoying are Connections, another puzzle hosted by The New York Times, and Keyword, hosted by The Washington Post. Keyword looks like part of a crossword puzzle – you’re given 6 vertical words, each missing one letter lined up in a horizontal row; your goal is to find the missing word in as few guesses as possible. (A perfect score is 6 letters.) It usually has a mix of easy and hard words. For example, “?ARROT” is probably CARROT, but “RI?E” could be any number of words. When you enter the correct letter, the square turns green; a wrong answer turns it pink. Either way, it shows a count of how many guesses you’ve taken on that letter.
Connections takes a whole different approach, presenting you with a four-by-four grid of words. Your task is to determine what the connections are between the words, correctly grouping them in sets of four. What makes this difficult is the combination of overlapping categories – there’s usually a couple words that could fit into different categories, even once you successfully identify the categories. For example, yesterday’s Connections included the word “Duds” in the Slang for Clothes category, which was also a fit for the “Failures” category.
As you complete each grouping, the words move into a colored box; the different colors indicate the level of difficulty. You have up to four mistakes, so you want to be careful with your selections. On the plus side, it won’t let you submit the same erroneous group of four again. Sometimes the problem I have matching the categories is a lack of context, such as MTV shows or NFL players, which are both outside the scope of my fandoms and general knowledge.
Like Wordle, both Keyword and Connections provide a handy summary of your result that can be shared with friends without revealing the answers. Which are your favorite Wordle variants?