How to Play Connections
The rules fit in one sentence: find the groups that the words belong to. Here is everything else you need to know.
The board
Every board is a grid of words. On the classic board there are sixteen words that form four groups of four. Larger modes add more groups, and Mini Connections uses three groups of three.
Making a guess
Select as many words as there are in a group and press Submit. If all of them belong to the same group, they lock together into a coloured bar with the name of the category. If not, you lose one mistake.
“One away”
When three of your four words are right, the game tells you that you are one away. Do not throw the guess out: keep three of the words and swap the fourth.
Colours
Groups are coloured by difficulty. Yellow is the most straightforward group and purple is usually based on word play. In Hard, XL and XXL modes extra colours are added above purple.
Kinds of groups
A group can be a plain category (birds), a description (things that are round), a set of words that complete a phrase (___ cake), words with a hidden word inside, homophones, or anagrams. If a word seems to fit nowhere, it is probably in the word-play group.
Winning and losing
You win by finding every group before you run out of mistakes. If you run out, the remaining groups are revealed so you can see how the board was built.