Play Connections
April 4, 2025 at 7:53 AM by Dr. Drang
I play the NY Times Connections game every morning on my phone. The key to winning is to think through the possibilities and not be sucked in by the red herrings the game usually presents. For a long time, I tried to keep all the possibilites in my head before submitting any guesses. Then I thought of a way to help me keep track of the groups as I considered them. Later—and here’s where I entered a gray area that you might consider outright cheating—I thought of a way to automate the most boring part of that process.
Basically, I take a screenshot of the puzzle, open it in Photos, and use the highlighter tool to mark the tiles that form a group. Here’s what it looked like as I started on today’s puzzle (don’t worry, I’m not revealing any of the groups):
You’ll note that the puzzle image contains just the tiles. None of the buttons or other surrounding dross of the web page is included. That’s not really necessary, but it makes the image cleaner. I get that look by running this shortcut called :
| Step | Action | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  |
Like it says, take a screenshot. |
| 2 |  |
Crop the screenshot so just the game tiles appear with a little padding around them. |
| 3 |  |
Save the image. |
| 4 |  |
Open the Photos app to the Recents collection, which makes it easy to select the puzzle. |
The y-offset of 490 pixels is set to make the padding roughly equal on all sides. The width of 1206 pixels is the width of my iPhone 16 Pro, and the height is the same because the game is basically a square. These values would have to change for people who play on a different phone.
When I have the game open in Safari on my phone, I press the side button, say “Play Connections” to Siri, and Photos opens a couple of seconds later, ready for me to bring up the cropped screenshot by tapping its thumbnail in the lower right corner of the Library. Then I select the highlighter tool and start playing. When I’m done highlighting, I return to Safari and submit my guesses.
We all have our boundaries, and with this I may have overstepped yours. But I watched Only Connect long before the Times stole Connections from it, and contestants typically go through many guesses in the early stages of the game to work out the red herrings. I see my little crutch as something akin to that.
Or maybe I’m just rationalizing my cheating.