Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad
The new daily game at the New York Times is called Connections, and I’ve seen a few people comment that they just don’t like it as much as Wordle or Spelling Bee. That the difficulty is inconsistent and it often makes you just feel stupid.
I thought it would be interesting to contrast this to Word Dad, a puzzle game made by my friend, master game designer John Cutter.
A brief aside on puzzles
All three of these are more correctly called puzzles, of course. The main difference between a game and a puzzle is that a puzzle has one real solution, an optimal way through the challenge. In a game, finding an optimal way through the challenge is known as a degenerate strategy or even “solving the game” if you’re a mathematician. This means that really, puzzles and games are terms that are matters of degree, not kind.
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