Games like Connections: daily grouping and link puzzles

The nearest games keep the board exactly as it is. Connections: Sports Edition, from The Athletic and the New York Times, uses sports terms. Cinections does it with films and Harmonies with music, so a film or music fan gets the same red-herring traps in a subject they know. Viererkette in German and Dagens fyra in Swedish bring the format to other languages, which makes them good practice for learners as well.

The next group is about spotting the link rather than sorting. LinkedIn's Pinpoint shows you words one at a time and asks what category they share, rewarding you for guessing early. Catfishing shows the categories a Wikipedia article sits in and asks you to name the article, which is Connections run backwards. Keyword from the Washington Post asks for the one word that completes six others.

If you like the wordplay side of Connections, Codenames Daily hands you a spymaster's clue to decode, Circuits on Puzzmo builds chains of two-word terms, and Crossclimb on LinkedIn turns trivia answers into a word ladder. Bracket City nests clues inside clues until one fact remains.

Start with Connections: Sports Edition or Cinections if you want the same game in a new subject, and with Pinpoint if you want something quicker. Most of these take five minutes or less and refresh once a day.