The New York Times has made it just a little easier for players to practice their word-spelling skills.
ConnectionsThe New York Times’ popular word association game is getting a new feature that lets players share their in-game stats with friends. Starting Tuesday, players will be able to look up and share data with friends, including the number of puzzles a person has completed, a win percentage and a person’s streak for playing the game.
Connections is a word game where players look at a 4×4 grid of words and try to find the hidden theme behind groups of words. Each group contains four words and there are four groups in total. The game only gives you four chances to guess the correct grouping, so if you make more than four mistakes, you lose. It is a daily puzzle, so the difficulty can really vary depending on how obscure the solutions are. Now, the game gives you a good idea of how good you are at it.
Below you can see what the new feature looks like, but you can also share your score for the day, as well as other long-term data like how many puzzles someone has completed and their win percentage. According to Jonathan Knight, head of games at The New York Times, players will be able to use these new features to “track, analyze and reflect on their gameplay,” but if you ask me, I think it’s just a way for die-hard fans to promote their word-game skills.
I’ve seen a lot of super-hardcore competitive TikTokers show off how fast they can solve these puzzles, and now they have the data to back it up. Unfortunately, there’s still no timer. So if you’re the type of person who gets a kick out of completing a word game really, really quickly, you’ll just have to find another way to share your talents.