Four wrong guesses and the puzzle ends.
Each day, a small board of sixteen words invites players to pause and ask how things belong together — a question as old as human thought itself. The New York Times, in partnership with The Athletic, has channeled that impulse into Connections Sports Edition, a daily puzzle that layers sports knowledge against the deeper skill of categorical thinking. Today's edition, number 147, moves from the simple pleasure of naming synonyms for defeat to the quiet revelation that football, swimming, speed skating, and track and field all share a rule about beginning too soon — a reminder that the most surprising connections often hide in plain sight.
- Sixteen words sit on a board and the clock of daily ritual has already started — solve it before the conversation moves on without you.
- Four wrong guesses end the game entirely, so every placement carries real consequence and the board's apparent chaos creates genuine tension.
- Players shuffle, second-guess, and strategize — the yellow and green categories offer footholds, but the purple category demands a lateral leap most casual fans won't see coming.
- Today's hardest grouping quietly unites football, speed skating, swimming, and track and field under a single obscure rule, rewarding breadth of knowledge over depth in any one sport.
- Once solved, the puzzle becomes social currency — shareable results turn a private moment of thinking into a public signal of sports literacy and wit.
The New York Times, working alongside its sports journalism property The Athletic, has built a daily word puzzle that asks players to sort sixteen words into four groups sharing a hidden common thread. Four wrong guesses end the game, so each decision carries weight. The board is color-coded by difficulty — yellow being the most accessible, purple the most demanding — and resets every day, creating a quiet ritual for players who return each morning to test themselves.
Puzzle number 147 demonstrates the game's range well. The easiest category groups four synonyms for a lopsided defeat: crush, flatten, pulverize, and trounce. The next step up collects four racket sports — badminton, pickleball, squash, and tennis — where the connection is pleasingly literal. The blue category requires genuine basketball knowledge, asking players to recognize Allen, Curry, Harden, and Lillard as surnames belonging to the NBA's all-time leaders in three-pointers made, spanning different eras of the game.
The purple category is where the puzzle earns its reputation for difficulty. Football, speed skating, swimming, and track and field share a specific and somewhat obscure rule: all four sports penalize false starts. A swimmer who dives early, a sprinter who breaks before the gun, a speed skater who moves prematurely, a football player who jumps offside — each sport has its own version of the same infraction. Recognizing that thread requires not just sports knowledge but the ability to think sideways about what seemingly unrelated things have in common.
This layering is the game's real appeal. It rewards both the casual fan who spots the obvious groupings quickly and the deeper thinker who can find the rule hiding across four different sports. Like Wordle before it, the daily reset turns the puzzle into a small shared event — a moment of play that doubles as a bridge between the Times' games audience and its sports journalism ambitions.
The New York Times has launched a sports-themed version of its popular word puzzle game Connections, developed in partnership with The Athletic, the Times' sports journalism arm. The game works like its predecessor: players face a board of 16 words and must sort them into four groups that share a common thread. Each correct grouping removes those words from play; four wrong guesses and the puzzle ends.
What makes Connections Sports Edition distinct is its focus on athletic knowledge and sports culture. The puzzle resets daily, and each new set grows progressively harder. The difficulty is color-coded—yellow for the easiest category, then green, blue, and purple for increasingly tricky connections. Players can shuffle the board to help spot patterns, and once they solve a puzzle, they can share their results on social media, turning the game into a social experience.
Today's puzzle, number 147, illustrates how the game blends straightforward sports knowledge with wordplay and lateral thinking. The yellow category asks players to identify four synonyms for a decisive defeat: crush, flatten, pulverize, and trounce. These are words that mean to beat someone badly, but they're presented as individual items on a board where other words might seem to fit.
The green category shifts to racket sports—badminton, pickleball, squash, and tennis. Here the connection is literal: all four are sports played with a racket or paddle. The blue category demands deeper sports knowledge: it lists four surnames of NBA players who rank among the league's all-time leaders in three-pointers made. Allen, Curry, Harden, and Lillard represent different eras of basketball, from Ray Allen's pioneering role in the three-point revolution to Damian Lillard's contemporary dominance.
The purple category, marked as the hardest, requires recognizing that football, speed skating, swimming, and track and field all share a specific rule: they all feature false starts as a penalizable infraction. A runner who breaks too early in track, a swimmer who dives before the gun, a speed skater who moves prematurely, or a football player who jumps offside—each sport has its own version of this violation.
The game's appeal lies in this layering of difficulty. A casual sports fan might quickly spot the racket sports or the defeat synonyms. But recognizing that four seemingly unrelated sports share a rule about false starts requires both breadth of sports knowledge and the ability to think sideways about what connects things. The puzzle tests not just what you know about sports, but how you think about categories and connections.
Connections Sports Edition joins a growing suite of daily word games from the Times, each designed to be solved in a few minutes but challenging enough to require real thought. Like Wordle before it, the game's daily reset creates a ritual—a moment each morning or evening when players return to test themselves against a new puzzle. The partnership with The Athletic signals the Times' strategy of using its sports journalism property to deepen engagement with its games audience, creating a natural bridge between news and play.
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What's the actual appeal here? It's a word game tied to sports. Why not just play regular Connections?
The sports angle isn't just window dressing. It changes what you need to know. In regular Connections, you might group words by etymology or pop culture. Here, you need to know that Ray Allen, Stephen Curry, James Harden, and Damian Lillard are connected by a specific basketball statistic. That's a different kind of knowledge.
But doesn't that make it harder for people who don't follow sports closely?
It does, and that's intentional. The Times is betting there's an audience of sports fans who want their daily puzzle to speak their language. It's the same reason they have a games hub—different games for different people.
The false starts category seems genuinely clever. How do you even think to look for that?
That's where the difficulty comes in. You see football, speed skating, swimming, track and field—four completely different sports. Your brain wants to find something obvious, like they're all Olympic sports or they're all individual competitions. But the connection is a rule, a specific kind of penalty. It rewards players who know sports deeply enough to think about their mechanics, not just their names.
So the game is testing both breadth and depth of knowledge?
Exactly. The yellow category—crush, flatten, pulverize, trounce—that's almost a vocabulary test. But the purple category? That requires you to have internalized how multiple sports actually work. It's why people come back every day.