Connections Copilot

I’ve been playing the Connections game from NY Times Games on and off for a little under a year. I’m generally pretty bad at word games, so games like Scrabble, Wordle, or anything where you need to guess letters or build words from letters isn’t my jam.

But Connections was different for me. It focuses more on what the words mean together which was much more doable for me, even if I still get them wrong pretty often.

The only trouble was that I really wanted the ability to plan out my guesses. If you have played Connections before, you will know the feeling of being tricked by the authors into thinking some words belong together in one quadruple but after you enter your guess and come up empty, it turned out you just weren’t thinking far enough ahead.

First attempt #

To help myself not get caught by the trickery, I tried to make planning easier by importing the words as little digital post-it notes into Miro, a digital whiteboard and collaboration tool that I use at work sometimes where you can drag things around on the screen. This worked really well, but was really tedious to have to open it up every day, import the words manually, and then play the game.

There had to be a better way!

Let’s make a web app #

I decided to play around with a small web app I call Connections Copilot which reads the daily game from the NYT website, and displays the words as tiles in a similar way to the Connections game. But instead of letting you play the game and enter your answers, it only lets you drag them around, allowing you to visually put them into groups to help you think it through. Once you’re done planning, you head over to the real NYT Games app or website and enter your answers in hopes of getting a perfect game 🟨 🟩 🟦 🟪!

Legal trouble? I hope not… #

I toyed with the idea of letting people submit their guesses inside of Copilot but I don’t want to replace Connections, I only want to help myself and anyone else who finds it useful to play the real Connections game. I think this is probably for the best as I’ve come to find out a popular Connections clone website, which would let you play archive Connections games (as well as create your own – neat!) was forced to take the NYT word games offline. They still let you create your own custom puzzles but no longer host the Connections-proper games. I loved it when last year my wife used it to make me a “Matt Turns 39” puzzle 🥰.

I recently added support for archive games after a user asked for this feature. It lets you load words from any of the archive NYT games which is helpful since the NYT Games app now supports archive games for subscribers, but I think the important thing to note here, especially if any NYT lawyers are reading: Connections Copilot doesn’t really do anything without the actual NYT Games app or website. There is no satisfaction using Copilot without actually entering your answers into the real app since it never tells you the answers. I think you’ll agree it is a companion and not a replacement 😅.

Why a website and not a native mobile app? #

I may try it someday as a side project to my side project, but for now I’m pretty happy with it being a web app. I can distribute it as quickly and easily as I want, it’s nearly free for me to do this using Cloudflare Pages and Workers, and if you choose “Add to Home Screen” or similar functionality on your platform, the app will show up as full screen when you launch it from your home screen or app launcher.

So check it out if you play NYT Connections. If you have any thoughts on it, good or bad, drop me a line at [email protected] or say hi on Mastodon. I’m @mattmendick on hachyderm.io.