Forbes Connections Hints: The Complete, Honest Guide to the Puzzle Everyone’s Talking About
There’s a moment every Connections player knows well. You’re staring at 16 words. You’ve been staring for five minutes. One phrase continues refusing to fit anyplace logically, even though you feel like you almost have it. Your streak is on the line. And then, almost against your better judgment, you open a new tab and type “Forbes Connections hints.”
You’re not cheating. You’re not giving up. You’re doing exactly what millions of other people do every single morning.
This article is about all of it — the game, the hints, the community, and the surprising depth hiding inside what looks like a simple word puzzle.
Key Facts
| Detail | Information |
| Game name | NYT Connections |
| Who publishes it | The New York Times |
| Puzzle editor | Wyna Liu (since launch) |
| Launch date | June 12, 2023 (beta); August 2023 (full release) |
| How it works | Group 16 words into 4 categories of 4 |
| Difficulty colors | Green → Blue > Purple (hardest) → Yellow (easiest) |
| Mistakes allowed | 4 before the game ends |
| Total plays by 2024 | 3.3 billion — second only to Wordle |
| NYT Games total daily players | Over 10 million as of 2024 |
| What “Forbes Connections hints” means | Daily puzzle hint articles published by Forbes (and third-party sites using that search term) |
| Hint structure | Progressive — broad clues first, category names second, full answers last |
| Cognitive skill involved | Semantic memory, flexible thinking, pattern recognition |
| Sports Edition launched | February 9, 2025 (coinciding with Super Bowl LIX) |
| Origin | NYT internal annual Game Jam brainstorming session |
The Game That Took Over Morning Routines
If you asked someone in early 2023 whether a word puzzle from a newspaper could generate billions of plays, they probably would have laughed. Wordle had shown it was possible, sure. But another one?
Then NYT Connections launched quietly in June 2023, and something unexpected happened. People got completely hooked.
By the time 2024 rolled around, the game had been played 3.3 billion times. That number is almost hard to sit with. Three point three billion individual puzzle sessions, each one someone sitting somewhere — on a train, in bed before getting up, at a kitchen table with coffee going cold — staring at 16 words and trying to find the hidden pattern.
The reason it spread so fast isn’t complicated. The game is genuinely brilliant in how it balances feeling simple and being hard. It takes about 30 seconds to understand the rules. It can take 30 minutes to actually solve a particularly tricky board.
How the Game Actually Works
Let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what Connections actually is, because it’s easier to understand the hints once you understand the game underneath them.
Every day, a new grid of 16 words appears on screen. Your job is to sort those 16 words into four groups of exactly four words each. Each group shares a hidden connection — maybe they’re all types of something, all words that follow a particular word, all associated with a specific person or place, or connected in some more surprising and oblique way.
The four groups are color-coded by difficulty. Yellow is the most accessible — often a category most players spot relatively quickly. Green is a step up. Blue gets genuinely tricky. Purple is the hardest category, and it’s where the puzzle makers really let their creativity go wild. Purple categories frequently involve wordplay, hidden meanings, or connections so lateral that they feel almost unfair until the moment you see them. And then they feel obvious.
Before the game is over, you can make four mistakes. Each wrong guess costs you one of those precious chances. You don’t lose points — you just lose options. And when your fourth wrong guess goes in, the game shows you all the answers at once, which is both a relief and a mild humiliation.
After the game, you get a little colored grid of dots showing how you did — which you can share. This shareable result card is partly why the game spread so fast. People posted them everywhere.
The Person Who Makes Every Puzzle
Here’s a detail that surprises a lot of players. Every single Connections puzzle is made by one person.
Her name is Wyna Liu. She’s a puzzle editor at the New York Times with a background that feels almost perfectly designed for this kind of work — she studied at Oberlin College, got a master’s from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, makes laser-cut sculptures as an artist, and designs jewelry. She came to crossword puzzles in her late 20s and got obsessive about them. Her life changed when she and her mother went on a cruise with a crossword theme in 2017 and met an editor from the Times.
By 2020 she was working as a puzzle editor at the Times. By 2023, she had a game of her own.
Connections came out of something called the NYT Game Jam — an annual internal event where staff pitch and prototype new game ideas. When Connections was approved, the team needed an editor to build it. Liu was the only puzzle editor without a game at that point. So the assignment landed with her.
She builds every board herself. She carries a sketchpad everywhere — a giant notebook full of word blocks and potential groupings. She works out combinations in a Google Sheet, dragging words around digitally, then crosses back to paper when she wants to feel the words differently. She describes the process of building a great puzzle with what sounds like genuine joy.
She also mostly stays off social media. She hears about player reactions secondhand through colleagues. This is probably wise, because Connections players have strong feelings. One TikTok creator declared his daily mood entirely determined by how Connections went. Someone once left a comment calling Wyna Liu their “mortal enemy” — which she apparently found wonderful.
What “Forbes Connections Hints” Actually Means
If you’ve searched this phrase, you might have expected to find one official Forbes page with hints. The reality is slightly more layered.
Forbes does publish regular daily puzzle coverage, including Connections hints. But “Forbes Connections hints” has also become something of a search category in its own right — a phrase that players type when they want guided help rather than a flat answer list. Several websites beyond Forbes use that exact phrasing to help players find their hint content through search.
What all of these have in common is the approach. The best Connections hint coverage doesn’t just dump the answers. It works in layers.
The first layer is a broad nudge — something like “think about words that can follow a color” or “consider these words might all relate to something you’d find in a kitchen.” You don’t know the category yet. You just have a direction.
The second layer gets a little more specific. Category themes get hinted at, sometimes even named, without revealing which exact words belong to them.
The third layer reveals the category names outright. At this point you know what you’re looking for — you just have to figure out which four words fit.
The final layer gives you everything: the complete groupings, all four categories, all 16 words placed where they belong.
The brilliant design of this layered approach is that you can stop reading at any point. The moment you feel like you have enough of a nudge to go back and try again, you close the tab. You don’t have to see the full answer if all you needed was a small push.
This respects the player in a way that’s actually kind of rare in the hint ecosystem. Most answer sites are built to make you scroll past the answer accidentally. A well-designed hint page is built to make it easy to stop before you do.
The Streak Problem — And Why Hints Became So Important
Something happened as Connections added stats and streak tracking in September 2024. The game got emotionally weightier for a lot of players.
When you’ve maintained a 60-day streak — 60 mornings in a row of completing the puzzle without failing — that number means something. It represents real consistency, real effort, a small personal ritual that’s become meaningful. It’s woven into your routine.
And then one Tuesday, there’s a purple category that makes no logical sense to you. You’re down to your last mistake. Your streak is about to end.
This is exactly the moment most people reach for Forbes Connections hints.
The hints didn’t just become popular because the puzzles are hard. They became popular because the emotional stakes of not failing got higher as streaks got longer. A hint page that lets you get unstuck without fully solving the puzzle for you is a way to keep the game rewarding without letting a single opaque purple category ruin something you’ve built over months.
That’s actually quite human. We want to feel we solved it ourselves. We also don’t want to lose something we’ve worked for over a bad day. Hints let us have both, most of the time.
The Brain Science Behind Why the Game Is Hard
There’s real cognitive science behind why Connections puzzles trip people up, and understanding it genuinely makes you better at the game.
Cognitive scientists who study semantic memory — the part of your brain that stores word meanings and associations — have looked at Connections puzzles specifically. What they found is interesting.
Your brain organizes words through networks of associations. When you see the word CREDIT, your brain immediately activates connected concepts — Visa, Discover, debt, card, payment. This is called semantic priming. It happens automatically and fast.
The problem is that Connections puzzles are specifically designed to exploit this. In one real puzzle, the words CREDIT, DISCOVER, and VISA all appeared on the board. Though they weren’t in the same group in the puzzle, your brain yells, “those are credit cards.”. The connection the puzzle was actually using was completely different.
This is by design. Wyna Liu and her team build in what players call “red herrings” — words that look like they belong together but actually don’t. Your brain’s automatic association system is being deliberately outfoxed.
The harder categories — blue and purple — often require you to mentally combine words with another word you can’t see. CHARLEY, CRAZY, DARK, and GIFT once appeared together because each one can precede HORSE to make a phrase: charley horse, crazy horse, dark horse, gift horse. To solve this, you can’t just look at the four words. You have to imagine each one paired with something that isn’t on the board at all.
That’s a meaningful cognitive leap. And it’s why purple categories feel so satisfying when you get them — and so maddening when you almost do.
Strategies That Actually Work
All of this brain science translates into real strategies. Here are the ones that genuinely make a difference.
Start with what you’re most confident about. Don’t guess unless you’re fairly certain. The yellow category is usually the most accessible, and solving it removes four words from the board — which makes the remaining 12 easier to sort.
Hold your most versatile words back. If a word seems like it could belong to three different categories, don’t commit it early. It’s probably doing something sneaky and you want to understand what before you lock it in.
Think about every possible meaning of every word. Words in Connections almost always have multiple meanings, and the puzzle is usually using the one you didn’t think of first. SPRING might mean a season, or a coiled metal thing, or an action. PITCHER might be a container for water, or a baseball player. Before you decide what something means, ask yourself what else it could mean.
Look for the hidden word trick on harder categories. Ask yourself: can these words all follow the same word? Can they all precede the same word? Can they all fit inside a phrase you haven’t thought of yet?
Take breaks. Seriously. Coming back after 60 seconds of looking at something else resets your perspective. You stop seeing what you expected to see and start seeing what’s actually there.
And use hints at the right moment — after you’ve genuinely tried, not before.
The Community That Grew Around It
The Connections community is bigger and warmer than you might expect.
On TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and countless Discord servers, players share their colored result grids, debate yesterday’s purple category, and commiserate over the ones that broke their streaks. Wyna Liu became something close to a minor celebrity in this world — people tag her, write open letters to her, and argue affectionately about her puzzle choices.
The game even spawned professional extensions. The Athletic launched a Sports Edition of Connections in partnership with the NYT in September 2024, initially in beta. It officially launched on February 9, 2025, timed to Super Bowl LIX. By June 2026, a soccer-themed version had launched to run alongside the FIFA World Cup.
Forbes and other publications recognized that this community wanted something specific: guidance without spoilers. The daily hint coverage that grew up around Connections filled a real gap between “I’m stuck” and “just tell me the answer.” That gap turned out to be enormous.
Is Using Hints Actually Okay?
This comes up a lot. People feel vaguely guilty about using hints and wonder if it somehow counts less.
Here’s an honest answer. Puzzles exist to give you the satisfaction of solving something. If you spend 20 minutes genuinely trying, read one hint that nudges you in the right direction, and then go solve the rest yourself — you still solved most of it. The thinking was yours. The connections were yours. You just got a small push when the wall felt too high.
The only version of hint use that doesn’t really serve you is opening the hint page before you’ve tried at all. You get the answer but you get none of the experience that made the answer worth finding.
But that’s true of almost anything. There’s a difference between asking for help after trying and asking for help before trying. One builds on something. One replaces it.
Use hints after a real attempt. Stop reading the moment you have enough. Go back to the puzzle. That’s the loop that keeps the game rewarding.
Final Words
What started as an idea in an internal brainstorming session at the New York Times — one person pitching a concept, another person being handed it as her first game — became something that 3.3 billion people played by the end of its second year.
And around it, quietly and naturally, a whole ecosystem grew. Hint pages. Strategy guides. TikTok communities. Discord servers full of people comparing notes on purple categories. Forbes and others show up every morning to give players just enough to keep going without taking away the thing that makes the game worth playing.
Wyna Liu carries her sketchpad everywhere. She fills it with words, rearranges them, finds the connections that surprise even her. Every morning, millions of people open a browser tab or an app and encounter what she made.
That feels genuinely nice, when you think about it. A puzzle editor who loves the feeling of grrrrr before the breakthrough, building the same feeling for millions of strangers every day.
No wonder people keep coming back.
FAQs
1. What is Forbes Connections hints?
It refers to daily hint articles — published by Forbes and various other sites using the same search phrase — that help players solve the NYT Connections puzzle without immediately giving away all the answers. The hints are usually structured in layers: broad clues first, category names next, full answers last.
2. Who makes the NYT Connections puzzle?
Every single daily Connections puzzle is made by Wyna Liu, a puzzle editor at the New York Times. She’s been creating every board since the game launched in June 2023.
3. When did Connections launch?
It entered beta on June 12, 2023, and was fully released in August 2023 after exceeding the Times’ retention expectations during the beta period.
4. How do the difficult colors work?
Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, then blue, then purple. Purple is the hardest and tends to involve the most creative or lateral connections. Many players start with yellow to reduce the board and build momentum.
5. How many mistakes can you make?
Four. Each wrong guess uses up one mistake. After four wrong guesses, the game ends and shows you all the answers.
6. How many people play Connections?
By the end of 2024, Connections had been played 3.3 billion times total, making it the second most played NYT Games title after Wordle. NYT Games as a whole has over 10 million daily players.
7. Why do the hints come in layers instead of just giving the answers?
Because the experience of solving the puzzle is the whole point. A layered hint system lets you stop reading the moment you have enough of a nudge — so you still get to solve as much of it yourself as possible. Full-answer dumps are available at the end of hint articles, but good hint pages make it easy to stop before reaching them.
8. Is it considered cheating to use hints?
Most players and puzzle communities don’t consider it cheating, as long as you’ve genuinely tried first. Using a hint after a real attempt is just asking for help when you’re stuck. The game doesn’t have a leaderboard or competitive element — it’s personal.
9. Why do purple categories feel so much harder?
Purple categories often require combining the visible words with a word that isn’t on the board at all — making a compound word, idiom, or phrase. Your brain has to work in a more indirect way than just finding shared meanings. That extra step is exactly what makes them satisfying to solve.
10. What is the Forbes Connections hints format exactly?
The typical structure goes: a brief overview of the day’s puzzle difficulty, broad thematic clues, more specific category hints, optional category name reveals, and finally the complete groupings with all four words per category. You control how far you read.
11. Are there different versions of Connections?
Yes. The standard daily version is the core game. A Sports Edition launched on February 9, 2025 through The Athletic in partnership with the Times. A soccer-themed version launched in June 2026 for the FIFA World Cup. NFL team-specific themed puzzles were created in September 2025 for the start of the NFL season.
12. What’s the best strategy for solving Connections?
Start with words you’re very confident about. Hold back versatile words that could fit multiple categories. Think of every possible meaning for each word — the puzzle usually uses the meaning you didn’t think of first. For harder categories, ask whether each word can follow or precede another word not on the board. And step away for a minute if you’re stuck.
13. Does playing Connections have any cognitive benefits?
Research from cognitive scientists suggests word games that require flexible semantic thinking — like Connections — exercise semantic memory, pattern recognition, and the ability to suppress automatic associations in favor of finding less obvious ones. Whether that translates to long-term brain health is an open question, but the mental workout is real.
14. Where can I find today’s Connections hints?
Forbes publishes regular daily Connections hint articles at forbes.com. Searching “Forbes Connections hints” or “Connections hints today” will surface multiple daily hint resources. Many players bookmark one or two reliable hint pages and check them when needed rather than searching fresh each day.
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