Pokennection

Pokennection takes the Connections format and fills it with Pokémon. Each daily board shows sixteen of them, and four groups of four share a hidden category. Select four and press Send; a right group is revealed with its name, and a wrong one costs one of your four lives.

A category can be almost anything about the Pokémon: a shared type, an evolution line, a region, a colour, an egg group, a generation or a piece of deeper trivia. The challenge is that a Pokémon which looks like it belongs in one group may be there for another reason. You can play the same puzzle with sprites, which helps with visual groups, or with names only, which hides those clues; streaks are kept separately for each view.

Difficulty changes which categories can appear rather than the number of lives: Normal uses easy and normal groups, Hard uses harder ones and gives one hint, and Hard+ uses only the hardest, with two hints. Other daily variants include No overlap, where every Pokémon fits exactly one group, a 5x5 board of five groups with five lives, and Group Hunter, where you find every group hidden among the sixteen with no lives at all. Each combination is its own puzzle for the day.

Past puzzles can be played from the menu, and there is also an Unlimited mode, an Adventure mode, community puzzles, a Pokédex and a leaderboard. It suits Pokémon fans who know more than the original 151.

The game is a fan project by the developer Jhonathan Barreiro, who posts as JhonaMath. Its menu has a Languages list, and the screens and Pokémon names come in ten languages, Japanese, Korean and Chinese among them. Players can also build their own boards and share them on the Puzzles page for others to like.