Connections can make me feel like a smarty when I get it and a dummy when I don’t. Today I nailed the purple category first. It felt rewarding to piece together the logic of it, first with two elements, then three, and then (after a minute) the fourth.
Then I got stuck on the third category because I didn’t remember thou was short for thousand and didn’t have a read on the other category. Felt like a right fool. Rather like with crosswords, the difficulty is idiosyncratic, but as (I think) Ash said, crossword clues represent more discrete frustrations in guessing intent compared to a Connection that makes or breaks an entire day.
playing connections feels like forcing a conversation with the most annoying person in the world. “are these related things…things that are blue?” “ah, that’s technically correct, but it’s not the answer I was THINKING of! that’s called a red herring! so keep guessing!” no thank you
kinda; there’s almost an inventory management feel to it. “well, there’s five things that could be this category instead of four, so I need to figure out which other category one of these can fit in instead, or accept that this is an intentional misdirect and it’s not a category at all” i don’t know man, there’s video games where i can kickflip skateboards, why am i putting up with this
On a trip with some friends this summer, someone brought a NYT crossword book and it was really difficult to solve for a bunch of millennials as the questions were very obviously targetted to boomers and older gen x. Lots of film/TV actor stuff that we struggled with. It was both hilarious and frustrating.
Difficulty in these things really is wildly subjective.
if it was a book it could very well have been full of reprints from the 90s which would have been… well, full of older references lol
current-day nyt puzzles are way more up-to-date with stuff like SZA, and that’s not even getting into indie crossword venues like avcx crosswords or people who self-publish on their own blogs etc
respect to guest Chris for grappling with another Day The Clown Cried of Video Games question and landing on Milo (again), which means he should get some kind of Insert Credit merit(?) badge
That tracks. I imagine the audience for printed puzzles trends a lot older.
Fun little factoid, and I can’t find a source that isn’t word of mouth, but my home town apparently used to supply the NYT with most of its paper and the mill was at one point the largest in the world. Now it’s completely shut down lol.
The board game Codenames is like a good implementation of the Connections concept imo.
Basically you have two teams and a bunch of words layed out in a grid. Each word is secretly color coded, and the person that knows this needs to come up with a theme connecting the biggest number of their words possible while avoiding the words the other team has.
What makes it good is that you probably know the field of references of a certain person so it becomes way more of a social thing.
