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In NYT Connections: Sports Edition, the colors show the intended difficulty of the four categories: yellow is easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple as the trickiest. They do not indicate a sport or dictate the order you must solve the groups. Sports Edition uses the same rules as standard Connections; the difference is that its word groupings are sports-related.
What do the Connections colors mean?
Each puzzle has 16 words to sort into four groups of four. Every group has a shared connection, and the color assigned to it signals how difficult the editors intend that category to be. The New York Times Help Center describes yellow as the easiest and purple as the trickiest, with green and blue between them. The NYT Help Center’s Connections rules apply to Sports Edition as well.
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| Color | Intended difficulty | What the category may involve |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow | Easiest | A straightforward connection, such as synonyms or things that belong in a familiar group. |
| Green | Next easiest | An intermediate category connection; no single category type is guaranteed. |
| Blue | More demanding | Often specialized trivia, rather than a simple definition. |
| Purple | Trickiest | Often wordplay or a nonliteral connection. |
The examples for blue and purple reflect how Connections editor Wyna Liu described the categories in an interview with The Atlantic. They are tendencies, not formulas: a particular puzzle may feel different depending on what a solver knows or notices.
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Why can a color feel easier or harder than expected?
The color is an editorial signal, not an objective score for every player. Liu said the team asks internal testers and some former Crosswords fellows to rate each puzzle’s difficulty, say whether the color matched their experience, and flag possible alternate solutions. She also noted that difficulty is subjective. The team’s feedback process does not mean each color corresponds to a fixed number on a difficulty scale.
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Sports Edition can add a knowledge hurdle when a grouping depends on specialized sports trivia. But recognizing a sports term is only part of the task: the game is built around plausible overlaps among words, so a tempting connection may not be the intended one. The official rules describe each puzzle as having exactly one solution.
Do you have to solve the colors in order?
No. Yellow-to-purple is the intended difficulty ranking, not a required sequence. You can identify and submit any group first. The board’s overlapping clues may make a supposedly easier category less obvious to you than a later one.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What changes in Sports Edition?
The game’s subject matter is sports, but the category-color meanings and core rules are the same as in standard Connections. The NYT Help Center lists the NYT Games website, The Athletic website and app, and the NYT News App as places to play Sports Edition. It also says Sports Edition does not have an archive. The original Connections archive is a separate feature, so its availability should not be taken to mean Sports Edition puzzles can be replayed from an archive.
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