What is Connections: Sports Edition? Explaining the new twist on New York Times’ viral game | Sporting News

You’ve heard of Immaculate Grid, but the sports trivia marketplace is getting a bit more crowded this week. Enter Connections: Sports Edition, a brand new version of the viral New York Times game tailored toward those looking to test their sports knowledge.

The online logic game requires players to group sports terms that share a common thread into four related categories. This is the first game collaboration between the world-famous newspaper and its recent acquisition, sports media organization The Athletic.

Though only a tester version of the game has been released so far, it’s a positive development for sports trivia nerds everywhere. Here’s everything to know about Connections: Sports Edition, explaining the new twist on New York Times’ game.

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What is Connections: Sports Edition?

Connections: Sports Edition is a new version of the New York Times’ famed Connections game, which came out with its own beta phase in June 2023. Since then, the original has become the newspaper’s second-most-played game behind Wordle. 

The goal of Connections, both the original and the Sports Edition, is to divide a grid of 16 words into four groups of four, with each group belonging to a specific category. Additionally, these categories are color-coded based on how difficult they are to group. Purple represents the hardest category to find, followed by blue, green and yellow being the easiest—however, the colors are only revealed once the group is matched together.

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How to play Connections: Sports Edition?

Both Connections games are played the same way, though the Sports Edition obviously has a specific niche to draw categories from. Users get four lives when attempting to match groups together — the game is won by matching all four categories before running out of lives, and the game is lost if all lives are used up before determining the final groups.

Matching goes as follows: 16 words are scrambled in a 4-by-4 grid, and the player is required to tap on four boxes containing words they think belong in the same group before hitting submit. A wrong guess eliminates a life, and a correct guess removes the category from the existing word pool.

For example, “goal,” “touchdown,” “home run” and “try” are all words used to describe a score in an individual sport. When opening the game, all four words would be randomly scrambled among 12 others in the grid, and it is the player’s job to determine the words are related. When a category is guessed, its title is revealed as well as the color determining its difficulty—in this case, the category would be titled something like “Scoring Plays.”

The player then has their remaining lives to discover the three other groups. 

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Where to play Connections: Sports Edition?

Though Connections: Sports Edition is only available in a beta version at the moment, it’s accessible to all. Those interested can find the game on the New York Times/Athletic website through this link. The grid refreshes every night at 12 a.m. ET with four new categories for the next day.

Hints and answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition

Want help with the Connections: Sports Edition categories but don’t want to fully spoil them? Here are a few hints to kickstart things in today’s grid—and fair warning, don’t scroll past unless answers are what you seek.

• Yellow: Names in athletic-wear
• Green: Teams from a league with a complete 2024 regular season
• Blue: Prolific athletes with a shared identity
• Purple: Known for making calls

Spoilers below! Here are today’s Connections: Sports Edition categories.

• Yellow: Sneaker Brands
• Green: WNBA Nicknames
• Blue: Legendary “Michaels”
• Purple: NFL Broadcasters