Find the common thread among sixteen words before you run out of guesses
Each morning, the New York Times invites players into a small arena of collective knowledge, where sixteen words conceal four hidden kinships spanning baseball scoreboards, college mascots, NBA rosters, and the quiet precision of curling. Connections: Sports Edition #569 is less a test of trivia than a meditation on how much of the world we absorb without realizing it — and how that knowledge surfaces, unexpectedly, in a browser tab before the day has fully begun. The puzzle resets at midnight, indifferent to yesterday's struggles, offering everyone an equal and fleeting chance to see the pattern.
- Sixteen words sit on the board like strangers at a party — the pressure is to find who belongs together before four wrong guesses end the game.
- The difficulty escalates deliberately: baseball abbreviations yield quickly to those who think in scoreboards, but curling terminology like 'bonspiel' and 'house' can strand even confident players.
- College mascots and NBA roster knowledge demand the kind of accumulated, half-forgotten sports literacy that suddenly feels urgent when the clock is ticking.
- Players shuffle, rearrange, and second-guess themselves, navigating toward resolution one color-coded grouping at a time — yellow first, purple last, if they're lucky.
- The puzzle's social sharing feature transforms a solitary mental exercise into a daily ritual of comparison, bragging rights, and communal commiseration across feeds and group chats.
- Tomorrow the board resets entirely, and the cycle of challenge, frustration, and small triumph begins again — the Times counting on that rhythm to keep players returning.
The New York Times has carried its daily puzzle habit into sports territory, and Connections: Sports Edition #569 arrives on an April morning with sixteen words and four hidden groupings waiting to be found. The premise is simple — identify what connects each cluster of four — but the execution demands a surprisingly wide range of sports knowledge. Players are allowed four mistakes before the puzzle closes on them, and the board refreshes every twenty-four hours, growing incrementally harder with each new edition.
The easiest category, marked yellow, asks players to recognize how MLB teams appear on scoreboards: CIN for the Cincinnati Reds, MIL for the Milwaukee Brewers, PIT for the Pittsburgh Pirates, STL for the St. Louis Cardinals. The abbreviation format is the kind of thing you know without knowing you know it. The green category shifts to college athletics — Clemson, Detroit, LSU, and Memphis all share the tiger as their mascot, a detail that rewards years of passive exposure to college sports.
The blue category requires familiarity with a specific NBA roster: Luka Doncic, LeBron James, Marcus Smart, and Jarrett Vanderbilt all played for the Los Angeles Lakers when this puzzle was built. The names alone offer no obvious signal; the connection lives in knowing the team. The purple category, the hardest, travels furthest from common knowledge — into curling. Bonspiel, end, house, and stone are the sport's vocabulary, and without prior exposure, no amount of lateral thinking will reliably get you there.
Developed in partnership with The Athletic, the puzzle is designed to be both a personal challenge and a social one. Correct groupings vanish from the board in color-coded sequence, and the Times built in a sharing feature that has turned these daily puzzles into a quiet form of social currency. The board resets at midnight, and tomorrow's sixteen words are already waiting.
The New York Times has extended its daily word puzzle empire into sports territory, and on this particular April morning, the challenge arrives in four distinct flavors of difficulty. Connections: Sports Edition #569 asks players to sort through sixteen words and identify four hidden groupings—a task that rewards both sports literacy and the kind of lateral thinking that makes these puzzles stick in your brain long after you've closed the browser.
The game itself operates on a straightforward premise: find the common thread. Four words belong together for a reason that isn't always obvious, and your job is to spot it before you run out of guesses. You get four mistakes before the puzzle shuts you down. The board resets every twenty-four hours, and each new iteration tends to get progressively trickier, which is why the New York Times publishes daily hint guides like this one—a small mercy for players who'd rather not start from scratch.
Today's puzzle, developed in partnership with The Athletic (the Times' sports journalism property), draws its difficulty from the breadth of sports knowledge required. The yellow category, marked as easiest, asks you to recognize how Major League Baseball teams appear on scoreboards: the Cincinnati Reds become CIN, the Milwaukee Brewers become MIL, the Pittsburgh Pirates become PIT, and the St. Louis Cardinals become STL. It's straightforward once you see it, but the abbreviation format can obscure the connection if you're not thinking in that direction.
The green category pivots to college athletics and their mascots. Clemson, Detroit, LSU, and Memphis all claim tigers as their symbols—a connection that requires knowing which schools wear that particular identity. It's the kind of detail that separates casual sports fans from those who've actually paid attention to college football and basketball over the years.
The blue category demands knowledge of a specific NBA roster. Luka Doncic, LeBron James, Marcus Smart, and Jarrett Vanderbilt all played for the Los Angeles Lakers at the time this puzzle was constructed. The names alone don't immediately signal their connection; you need to know the team composition.
The purple category, marked as hardest, ventures into specialized sports terminology. Bonspiel, end, house, and stone are all terms from curling—a winter sport that most casual puzzle players encounter rarely, if ever. A bonspiel is a curling tournament. An end is a round of play. The house is the target area. A stone is the object being thrown. Without familiarity with the sport, this category becomes nearly impossible to solve through logic alone.
The game allows players to shuffle and rearrange the board as they work, and each correct grouping is color-coded to signal its difficulty level. Once you lock in all four words of a category, they vanish from the board, and you move closer to victory. Share your results on social media if you want—the Times built that feature in, understanding that these daily puzzles have become a form of social currency among word game enthusiasts. Tomorrow brings a fresh puzzle, and the cycle begins again.
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why does the Times keep launching these sports-specific versions of their games? Isn't the original Connections enough?
The original works for a general audience, but sports fans are a distinct tribe. They want puzzles that speak their language. The Athletic partnership makes sense—it's the Times' own sports property, so they're building depth in their own ecosystem.
The curling category seems almost cruel. How many people actually know curling terminology?
That's the point of the purple tier. It's supposed to be the hardest. If everyone could solve it, there'd be no satisfaction in getting it right. The puzzle is designed so that even sports fans will struggle with that one.
Does knowing sports actually help you win, or is it just luck?
It helps tremendously with some categories—you need to know which schools have tiger mascots, which players are on the Lakers. But the puzzle also rewards pattern recognition and lateral thinking. You might not know curling, but if you can spot that those four words all relate to the same sport, you're halfway there.
What's the strategy for someone who gets stuck?
Shuffle the board. Look for obvious connections first—the yellow ones. Once you remove those, the remaining words often become clearer. And don't be afraid to take a guess on a category you're less sure about. Four mistakes is actually more forgiving than it sounds.