The Saturday, May 23 edition of NYT Connections gave solvers a fresh puzzle built around 16 words, four sets of four, and only one correct answer for each group. Players who ran out of tries hit the loss condition after four mistakes, a reminder that the game’s easy start can turn fast when the categories tighten.
Connections remains the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle outside the main crossword, and it is still a free offering. The appeal is simple: find the links between four pairs of four words, with difficulty coded by color and usually rising from yellow to blue or green and then purple. For players who want to go back through older grids, the full archive sits behind an NYT Games subscription.
This puzzle’s Blue Group leaned on superhero knowledge. Wolverine was likely the most familiar name in that set, while Hawkeye mattered because he was a consistent member of the Avengers and had his own show. Daredevil was also part of the group, with a still-airing series of his own, and Nightcrawler may have been the one that tripped people up. It was the sort of category that looks friendly until one stray comic-book name sends the board off course.
Another group turned on Star Wars, and a few of those matches came quickly. Force and Empire were the easy pairings there, while Phantom was another likely match. Last was trickier because it points to The Last Jedi, and the set also contained four movies that begin with “The.” That made the category feel more obvious in hindsight than it did while the board was still open.
The Yellow Group was the hardest for the writer and the one most likely to slow down casual solvers. It was built around hairdos, with beehive and chignon among the words in the set. The writer said they had a daughter and added, “I can’t do so much as a ponytail correctly.” It was a small joke, but it captured the gap between recognizing a style and actually knowing the category well enough to solve it quickly.
The Green Group was the easiest for the writer, who compared it to emails they get every day. That is the kind of category that feels almost unfair once you see it, because the connection is plain only after the answer is already sitting there. In a game built on patterns, the easiest board is often the one that feels least like a puzzle at all.
That mix of certainty and doubt is why Connections keeps drawing readers back each day. The structure is fixed, the rules are plain, and yet the board can still punish a rushed guess. On Saturday, May 23, the puzzle #1077 offered exactly that balance: a simple format, a single solution, and enough misdirection to make even the strongest category feel slippery until the last square was placed.
