Stripe Connections
August 13, 2025 at 4:42 PM by Dr. Drang
Earlier this year, I published a post about a Shortcut I made to help me c̸h̸e̸a̸t̸ play the NY Times Connections game on my iPhone. It’s called “Play Connections,” and it takes a screenshot, crops it to just the game grid, and saves it to Photos. I then use the highlighter tool in Photos to color in related clues before playing the game for real on the web page.
The Shortcut still works well, but only when the Times doesn’t have a stripe running across the top of the page begging me to hurry and subscribe for 75% off. The stripe pushes everything down, which offsets the cropping. For a while, I’d scroll down a bit to account for the stripe, but as the Times began including the stripe more and more often, I got tired of scrolling.1 So I made a new Shortcut, “Stripe Connections,” that crops to the game grid when there’s a stripe across the top. You can download it or make it yourself from these four steps:
| Step | Action | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  |
Take the screenshot |
| 2 |  |
Crop the screenshot to just the game grid. Account for the stripe that begs you to subscribe at the top of the page. |
| 3 |  |
Save the image |
| 4 |  |
Open Photos to the Recents collection. The cropped screenshot will be easy to open. |
Now I activate Siri and say either “Play Connections” or “Stripe Connections” to get the screenshot I want.
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Not tired enough to subscribe, of course. That would be crazy. ↩