Try playing The Athletic’s first game, Connections: Sports Edition, now in beta

Sports and games go hand in hand.

To start, sports themselves are games. Yet even if your connection to sports is more as a fan than an athlete, that passion almost surely comes out in competitive ways.

As fans, we break down and consume sports endlessly, well after the on-field contests are over. We watch highlights, read about and debate the results. We play sports video games — from Madden to NBA2K to Football Manager (a personal favorite), to name a few. And we create games within games, from fantasy sports to pub trivia to daily conversations and invented competitions among friends.

So we’re thrilled today to bring you one more outlet for your fandom.

Connections: Sports Edition is The Athletic’s first-ever game, and beginning this week, we’re sharing it daily in a beta test for your thoughts and (hopefully) amusement. We designed it in partnership with The New York Times Games team, the makers of the fabulous flagship Connections game. By combining their puzzle prowess with The Athletic’s sports expertise, we created a game that should feel familiar to Connections players, but with a twist — the addition of sports trivia and imagery.

The game is free to play here. We’ll be posting new game boards daily for the next several weeks.

Putting together the game boards is a fun challenge — creating connections and overlaps between sports terms that sometimes cross multiple sports. I catch myself watching, reading and thinking about sports in groups of four. Often, tuning into a game now can lead me down a word-association string that ends in a new idea — like, can I create a connection between London, the city, and Drake London? Or is there a way to build a thread between Golden State Warriors stars (Draymond Green) and golf course areas (putting green)? When inspiration strikes, I’ll make note of it and see if I can build a game board around those overlapping terms.

Sometimes it comes together, as you’ll see via the beta game boards. Other times, a kernel of an idea — like when I tried to connect the Charlotte Hornets and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets with two other teams — fizzles (or stays in the notebook, for now).

Incorporating players and teams adds a trivia twist that hopefully brings a fun challenge for sports fans. We’ve also added a timer to the game for another element of competition. We welcome your feedback here.

And if you ever get stuck and need a hint, we’ve got you. Connections: Sports Edition Coach will provide a clue for every category each morning.

Happy playing!

How to play

The game’s objective is to group sixteen words or objects into four groups of four based on commonalities within each group as quickly as possible. Find the groups without making four mistakes.

Each puzzle has exactly one solution, so watch out for words or items that seem to belong to multiple categories!

Category examples:
Sports ____ : Fan, Car, Bar, Radio
U.S. Summer Olympians: Biles, Phelps, Ledecky, Lyles

Each category group is assigned a color, revealed as you solve, ranging from straightforward (yellow) to medium (green) to challenging (blue) to tricky (purple). Of course, these group rankings are subject to interpretation, so we’d love to hear your thoughts. Click the ? button in the gameplay menu or email us directly at feedback-connections-sports-edition@theathletic.com to share your feedback!

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Chris Unger / Getty Images, Robbie Jay Barratt / AMA via Getty, Kenny Giarla / NBAE via Getty)