Word Groups

Word Groups is a daily word puzzle in the same family as the classic connections game. Every day you're given a 4×4 grid of 16 words, and your job is to sort them into 4 hidden categories of 4 words each. You select four words that seem to share a theme and press Submit — a correct guess reveals the category and slides those four words to the top of the grid, a wrong guess costs you one of four mistakes. Solve all four categories before you run out of mistakes and you win the day.

Each puzzle uses four difficulty tiers, marked by color once you solve the group. Yellow is the most straightforward — usually a plain semantic category like 'fruits' or 'card suits.' Green is a step trickier. Blue tightens the theme further. Purple is the hardest, and almost always involves wordplay, puns, hidden words, or a shared prefix / suffix. Every puzzle is hand-authored with at least one deliberate 'trap' word — a word that plausibly fits more than one category — which is what makes the game feel clever rather than trivial and why the same word can sit in the grid looking like it belongs to two groups at once.

A few strategy tips: start with the category you're most confident about, but stay suspicious of anything that feels too easy on the yellow tier — that's often where a trap word is hiding. Use the shuffle button freely: rearranging the tiles helps your brain spot new adjacencies you missed when the layout was fixed. When a wrong guess triggers a 'One away!' message, you know three of your four words are in the same real category — swap one word at a time to find the odd one out. Save the tier you're least sure about for last: elimination will often solve it for you.

This version of the game beats the original on the two things it deliberately restricts. It's free — no subscription, no signup, no paywall on any past puzzle ever. The archive lets you play every daily puzzle since launch on its original date, and Unlimited Practice mode pulls hand-authored puzzles from the same bank whenever you want more, without touching your daily streak. All the puzzles here are original content authored for Skycally — we do not reuse the New York Times Connections categories or word groupings, since those are the newspaper's editorial work.