I’m not super familiar with the brand OneRepublic.

I don’t know how many OneRepublic songs I can mention offhand, but I know that OneRepublic is a band and I know that they sing songs.

One song that they sang that I didn’t know that they sang, I had to just Google what is the song called and who sings it, is in my head every day.

They sing in the song, Connection.

Can I get a connection?

Can I get, can I get a connection?

I don’t really know the song all that well, but I know the chorus and it’s in my head every day these days because I play the New York Times Connections puzzle and of course I do my own.

Many of you who follow me on the internet already know that I’m doing lots of Connection puzzle type things, but I’m talking about it more.

So here we go.

♪ Your Daily Lex ♪ So if you haven’t seen the New York Times Connections puzzle, they launched them around July.

Some say that they ripped off a UK game show.

Um, Connect, only, connect, only, connect, connect.

I can’t think of what the UK game show is called.

You can see me trying to not use this name and now I can’t think of it.

MIT Connections UK game show.

Only Connect, I think is what it’s gonna be called.

Yes, Only Connect.

And New York Times says, no, it’s totally different.

And then they said, well, it’s not totally different, but it’s different enough.

But at any rate, they made this game, which shows you a grid, a four by four grid of words, meaning 16 total words.

And you have to group those words into four sets of four.

Each word can appear in only one set, but they do lots of tricky things, right?

So, you know, maybe if it’s a, if you have to group fish, they might also include the word bass.

And you think, oh, maybe bass goes with a fish, but in fact, bass is bass and it goes with musical terms.

And the words can be connected in all kinds of ways.

It’s never gonna be just like one syllable words, but it could be, you know, words that start with S or rhyming words or words from this song title or this movie, like the matches can be anything, or hey, here’s a bunch of words that relate to firefighters, I think is one that I used recently.

But so I loved these puzzles and I loved the idea of making them because I found a tool where you could make them.

And I liked the way your brain had to work to come up with good ones that were solvable and fun, whatever.

It’s hard sometimes to come up with the right difficulty level.

I’ve definitely published puzzles that are too hard.

I’ve published puzzles that are probably too easy.

And it’s interesting when you are making puzzles to think about what people want, because people want them to feel like they are challenging, but they want to be able to solve them, right?

People want to be able to do it.

But so I was using this site that somebody put together to create these connections puzzles, and it was fine, but you couldn’t edit your puzzles.

And like, it also wasn’t mine.

And I was just putting, and there was no way to even have like a list of all of your puzzles.

And so I was getting more and more annoyed and I decided to code my own.

And I’ve really, it’s grown by leaps and bounds over the past couple of weeks.

So lexfriedman.com slash connections might just be a week and a half old, two weeks old.

lexfriedman.com slash connections will always show you today’s puzzle.

I’m still debating what the share link should do.

Cause when you share, you know, when you get a score, you can share it and it’ll give you a little emoji grid showing how you did.

I used to include the link and then I stopped including link.

I think I’m going to go back to including the link, but anyway, slash connections will always show you today’s puzzle.

And there’s an archive of puzzles.

I’ve scheduled puzzles out like more than a month in advance at this point.

It saves your progress.

So if you refresh the page and come back on the same browser, you’ll pick up where you left off.

I added an RSS feed so that people can automatically find out about new puzzles if that’s their jam.

I don’t know, but it’s been a fun coding project.

And then, you know, Andy Bio, who’s a guy who I like a lot on the internet, who I don’t know personally, but I’ve read his stuff for a really long time.

He linked to it this week and then that got it passed around more of the nerd internet.

And of course there’s no reason I’m doing this other than fun.

I had somebody say like, are you trying to get the New York times to buy it?

No, the New York times already has a connections puzzle.

I emulated their connections puzzle.

They don’t need it.

And they already have somebody who’s authoring one.

I definitely like mine to be a little bit more challenging than the New York times.

Listen, sometimes the New York times stumps me and then I get really mad.

The New York times you get four chances and then you’re done.

In my version, you get infinite chances, but you know, your score gets worse and worse.

I also provide hints if you want hints.

But hints can either be two words or four words.

As I think I mentioned the last time I talked about this, my pal, Brian Warren, with who my cohost Sorgan in it, he looked at my initial design was like, well, that sucks.

Why don’t we make it less ugly?

And he helped me with some design stuff.

He also forced me to make my purple more purpley in certain places.

My buddy, Dan Warren, who’s Brian Warren’s nemesis.

He gave me some other bug related feedback on some stuff, which I also tweaked.

He pointed out a thing that was also bothering me about how when you hovered over a word and then unclicked it, it still was the same color for a little bit.

So we fixed some things, right?

So what’s been fun is like, kind of just designing it out in the open.

This week I added stats behind the scenes so that as people are guessing, I can know which ones are really hard or how many times people are using guesses or how many, or hints rather, and how many guesses on average the typical puzzle each day needs.

But if you haven’t checked them out, or if you checked them out and you thought they were too hard, I think I’ve better tuned, more finely tuned what the difficulty is.

So feel free to revisit lexfriedman.com slash connections and the hints mean that you can always solve it.

But yeah, it’s been fun.

And what I like about it in one respect, one is just fun.

I like that people are doing it.

You know, hundreds of people are doing it a day right now.

But what I really like is there’s no point other than fun.

Right?

It’s not going to make me any money.

It’s not going to make me any friends.

I didn’t come here to make friends.

I didn’t build connections to make friends.

I just did it for fun.

So I like that.

Sometimes we just do fun things.

Lex.