Connections gives you four mistakes to find four hidden groups. Most players solve in the order the puzzle presents it: yellow, green, blue, purple. That default order works most of the time. Looking at solve patterns across real recent puzzles shows a clearer picture of when this order helps you and when it quietly costs you a mistake.
What Makes Solving Order Harder Than It Looks
The rules make solving order look irrelevant. Sort sixteen words into four groups, in any order you like. But every guess you make changes what you know about the words left behind. A correct guess removes four words and clears up confusion for the rest. A wrong guess does the opposite: it burns a mistake and can send you chasing the wrong pattern for several turns.
According to tracking site WordsRated, the average Connections skill score sits around 88 out of 99, which works out to roughly one mistake per puzzle. On a harder-than-average day, community data from ConnectionsSports.com showed only about 74% of players clearing the board at all, with under half finishing with a perfect 4/4. Solving order is one of the few levers a player fully controls, which is why it matters more than most people realize.
How to Think About Every Guess
Your first guess is not an attempt to solve the hardest part of the board. It is a test of how well you are reading it.
Your job on your first submission is not to be right — it is to confirm whether your most obvious group survives contact with the full board. A guess that comes back “one away” is not a failure. It is data. Three of your four words were correct, and you now know exactly one thing needs to move.
Apply this logic across the whole solve:
- First submission: Your highest-confidence group, usually yellow.
- Second submission: Your next-clearest group, adjusted for anything the first guess revealed about trap words.
- Third submission: Now working with 8 words instead of 16, so overlap is much easier to see.
- Fourth submission: This one often solves itself, since the last four words have nowhere else to go.
How a Solve Actually Plays Out (Real Puzzle Walkthroughs)
Before ranking the colors by risk, it helps to see exactly how solving order changes the outcome in real puzzles.
Example 1: Puzzle #1,177 (August 31, 2026)
The board mixed gym synonyms, wine accessories, Energizer-adjacent brand names, and a wild-west wordplay group.
- One solver’s eye first landed on ENERGIZER — an obvious nod to the battery bunny — which pulled in TRIX, CADBURY, and PLAYBOY for the blue group (all things associated with rabbits or bunnies as mascots).
- OUTLAW suggested a wild-west purple group, tempting a guess of ALIAS, REWARD, WANTED alongside it.
- Instead of submitting purple on a hunch, the safer move was yellow first: GYMNASIUM, HEALTH CLUB, REC CENTER, YMCA — a direct synonym set with almost no overlap risk.
- That left green as a clean fill-in: AERATOR, CORKSCREW, DECANTER, STOPPER — wine accessories.
Notice what happened: the interesting group (blue, built around a bunny mascot theme) is what caught the eye first, but the safe group (yellow synonyms) is what should have been submitted first. Jumping on the interesting pattern before locking in the obvious one is exactly how a “one away” mistake happens.
Example 2: August 29, 2026 puzzle
This board had four clean, low-overlap categories:
- Yellow — under the hood of a car: ALTERNATOR, BATTERY, ENGINE, RADIATOR
- Green — kinds of salad: CHOPPED, GREEK, HOUSE, WEDGE
- Blue — keyboard keys: CONTROL, ESCAPE, SHIFT, SPACE
- Purple — starting with figures from Greek myth: AT LAST, HERALD, HYDRANT, TRITONE (each word hides a mythological name — ATLAS, HERA, HYDRA, TRITON — at the start)
Here the standard order works cleanly: BATTERY could plausibly overlap with the car category, but nothing else on the board competes for it, so yellow goes first with confidence. Purple is the one category built on hidden wordplay rather than meaning, which is why it’s listed last even though, once you notice the pattern, it can be spotted in one pass.
Example 3: Puzzle #500 — the “color words” puzzle
This puzzle used a single unifying trick: every category was a hidden color.
- Yellow ____: CAB, JACKET, JOURNALISM, PAGES
- Green ____: BERET, GOBLIN, SALAD, THUMB
- Blue ____: JAY, JEANS, MOON, WHALE
- Purple ____: HAZE, HEART, PROSE, RAIN
One solver described staring at the board blankly until “green beret” clicked, and then the rest fell quickly. This is a good example of a puzzle where the standard yellow-first order doesn’t matter much, because all four groups share one underlying trick — once you spot the trick anywhere on the board, every other group becomes easy to test, regardless of color.
Color by Color: What Each One Actually Rewards
| Color | Best Solved | Main Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow | First | Almost none — usually direct synonyms |
| Green | Second | One hidden decoy word |
| Blue | Third, once 8 words remain | Needs specific knowledge or a mascot/brand link |
| Purple | Last, by elimination | Wordplay or a hidden pattern, not meaning |
Yellow groups are usually direct and easy to state, which is why they work well as a safe opener — the gym-synonym group in Example 1 is a typical case. Green groups carry more risk than players expect, since a single decoy word (like ROSS almost joining a “valley synonyms” group in a past puzzle) can pull a guess off course. Blue and purple show the widest range of outcomes: sometimes blue is a simple category like keyboard keys, other times it needs specific trivia, like knowing which words pair with a bunny mascot.
Purple stays the hardest color overall, but per NYT’s own Connections Bot scoring, it also gets solved by elimination more reliably once the rest of the board clears — the bot even awards bonus points for finding purple early, which is part of why some experienced players deliberately hunt for it first instead of last.
The Order That Wins Most Often
Solving yellow first, then green, holds up well across most puzzles — both the August 29 and August 31 examples above confirm this. This default order gives you the safest start and clears the most obvious traps early.
Where it gets more interesting is blue and purple. Waiting until only eight words remain before tackling blue often leads to a cleaner guess than trying to solve it earlier, since fewer words means less overlap. Purple, more often than not, solves itself once yellow, green, and blue are already gone — as it did in the August 29 Greek-myth example.
When to Break From the Standard Order
The standard order is a strong default, not a fixed rule. If a blue or purple category becomes obvious to you before yellow does — the way “green beret” cracked open the entire color-themed puzzle in Example 3 — solving it first works just as well. What actually matters is confidence, not color.
A useful test before every guess: could two of these words plausibly belong somewhere else on the board? If the answer is no, that group is safe to submit, regardless of what color it happens to be.
Common Order Mistakes
Guessing purple early on a hunch, before checking it against the rest of the board, is one of the most common mistakes — Example 1 shows exactly how this happens, when OUTLAW made a wild-west purple group look tempting before yellow was even attempted. Community data collected by ConnectionsSports.com backs this up: in one analyzed puzzle, over 80% of incorrect submissions came from guessing a fourth word to complete a three-word overlap the player was already fairly confident about.
Treating green as automatically safe is another common mistake. Because green sits right after yellow, players tend to trust it more than they should, without checking for a hidden decoy first — the same ConnectionsSports.com data found a “gemstone” false category responsible for over a third of one puzzle’s errors, where players locked in three real matches and one decoy.
Conclusion
Solving order is a small habit with a real effect on how many mistakes you use. Yellow first, green second, is a strong default for most boards, as the August 29 and August 31 puzzles both show. But the biggest gains come from staying flexible — when a harder color becomes obvious early, the way the color-word trick did in puzzle #500, trust that read over the default order.
FAQs
Should I always solve yellow first?
It is usually the safest choice, but not a fixed rule. If another color becomes obvious to you sooner — like a wordplay trick that unlocks the whole board — solve that one first instead.
Is purple always the hardest to solve first?
Yes, in most cases. Purple categories are often built around wordplay or a hidden pattern, which is easier to spot once the rest of the board narrows down. NYT’s Connections Bot even rewards finding purple early with bonus points, which is why some experienced players go looking for it deliberately.
Does solving order actually reduce mistakes?
Yes. Solving your most confident group first gives you more information for every guess that follows. Community-tracked data shows most incorrect guesses come from submitting a group on a three-word hunch rather than four confirmed matches — an easier trap to fall into with harder colors.
What should I do if two colors seem equally obvious?
Solve the one with less overlap risk first. If both feel equally safe, either order works fine.
