Neat! Thank you for sharing. I feel like a good strategy for this connections varient is to look for the word that has lots of meanings first. I got this one with no errors
Neat! Thank you for sharing. I feel like a good strategy for this connections varient is to look for the word that has lots of meanings first.
Sounds like he’s not confident about publishing new daily puzzles over the long term. I hope he can! They’re tricky to design well! Because I wouldn’t expect any one person to commit to so much...
Sounds like he’s not confident about publishing new daily puzzles over the long term. I hope he can! They’re tricky to design well!
Because I wouldn’t expect any one person to commit to so much for a (free) puzzle game, I wanted to see how good ChatGPT is at designing puzzles for it. I used the same prompt three times to see if it would produce unique ones or if it would keep revisiting the same themes. That’s too small of a sample size but I’m still impressed with what it came up with. Formalizing a list of previously used words/categories to exclude would probably help.
Puzzle 1
STOUT
BREEZE
CALL-UP
SKETCH
DRAFT
LAGER
OUTLINE
GUST
CONSCRIPTION
Answers
Purple — Compulsory military recruitment
DRAFT, CALL-UP, CONSCRIPTION
Blue — Preliminary versions or plans
DRAFT, SKETCH, OUTLINE
Blue — Official marks or emblems
SEAL, STAMP, CREST
Green — Close a bottle/container
SEAL, CORK, CAP
Yellow — Marine mammals
SEAL, WALRUS, SEA OTTER
Hub word: SEAL.
I think all three of these are pretty solid. Each took an average of 2:15 to generate with GPT-5.5 which is way faster than it would’ve taken me (and presumably also Hank, his intelligence notwithstanding).
The prompt I used
Create a new puzzle for Hank Green’s 4x3 puzzle game.
This is similar to the NYT Connections game, but there are only 9 words instead of 12. One of those words is the “hub” word, which appears in all four categories. All of the other words only fit into a single category. Each category contains only three words. Care must be taken to ensure that the categories are specific enough and mutually exclusive, so that no word fits into multiple categories (except the hub word, which fits in all of them).
What I need from you:
The list of all nine words, shuffled.
The list of four categories, each followed by the three words from the main list that belong to that category.
The colors assigned to each category — purple, blue, green, and yellow, representing their relative difficulties from hardest to easiest respectively.
For our puzzle purposes, “words” are usually but not always single words; sometimes they are two or three words long but always as brief as possible. Proper names are allowed, as are occasional word fragments or words in foreign languages.
The categories themselves follow the same rules as those of Connections, which can vary quite a bit. Research examples of common category types in that game to understand the conventions that players expect.
Be clever! The best puzzles are the ones with red herrings, where two words that are not in the same category have something unrelated in common, suggesting a relationship between them, but no third word is present that would complete that set.
Before presenting your puzzle to me, double-check it thoroughly to ensure that all the requirements have been satisfied. Make sure each category has exactly three matching words, and that the hub word appears once in every category. Check for category specificity, accuracy, and overall puzzle cleverness.
I’ve shared this with several people and I’ve been playing it every day since it came out. But Hank has warned that he’s not going to support this game for very long. Since you can make your own...
I’ve shared this with several people and I’ve been playing it every day since it came out. But Hank has warned that he’s not going to support this game for very long. Since you can make your own levels and share them, it could last a while after he stops making them.
Ah, like NYTs “Connections” but with a twist, and free.
Also, a fair bit easier because once you get two you know the shared word.
I love this! Thanks for sharing it. Some of the special scoring rules crack me up:
4 × 3
June 24, 2026
-100 points • RULE BREAKER 💀
🟪🟪🌟
🟨🟨🌟
🟦🟦🌟
🟩🟩🌟
Neat! Thank you for sharing. I feel like a good strategy for this connections varient is to look for the word that has lots of meanings first.
I got this one with no errors
Hank's video about the game.
Sounds like he’s not confident about publishing new daily puzzles over the long term. I hope he can! They’re tricky to design well!
Because I wouldn’t expect any one person to commit to so much for a (free) puzzle game, I wanted to see how good ChatGPT is at designing puzzles for it. I used the same prompt three times to see if it would produce unique ones or if it would keep revisiting the same themes. That’s too small of a sample size but I’m still impressed with what it came up with. Formalizing a list of previously used words/categories to exclude would probably help.
Puzzle 1
Answers
Purple — Compulsory military recruitment
DRAFT, CALL-UP, CONSCRIPTION
Blue — Preliminary versions or plans
DRAFT, SKETCH, OUTLINE
Green — Beer terms
DRAFT, STOUT, LAGER
Yellow — Air currents
DRAFT, BREEZE, GUST
Hub word: DRAFT.
Puzzle 2
Answers
Purple — Minecraft product/edition names
JAVA, BEDROCK, EDUCATION
Blue — Indonesian islands
JAVA, BALI, SUMATRA
Green — Programming languages
JAVA, PYTHON, RUBY
Yellow — Coffee slang
JAVA, JOE, MUD
Hub word: JAVA.
Puzzle 3
Answers
Purple — Mononymous musicians
SEAL, PRINCE, STING
Blue — Official marks or emblems
SEAL, STAMP, CREST
Green — Close a bottle/container
SEAL, CORK, CAP
Yellow — Marine mammals
SEAL, WALRUS, SEA OTTER
Hub word: SEAL.
I think all three of these are pretty solid. Each took an average of 2:15 to generate with GPT-5.5 which is way faster than it would’ve taken me (and presumably also Hank, his intelligence notwithstanding).
The prompt I used
Create a new puzzle for Hank Green’s 4x3 puzzle game.
This is similar to the NYT Connections game, but there are only 9 words instead of 12. One of those words is the “hub” word, which appears in all four categories. All of the other words only fit into a single category. Each category contains only three words. Care must be taken to ensure that the categories are specific enough and mutually exclusive, so that no word fits into multiple categories (except the hub word, which fits in all of them).
What I need from you:
For our puzzle purposes, “words” are usually but not always single words; sometimes they are two or three words long but always as brief as possible. Proper names are allowed, as are occasional word fragments or words in foreign languages.
The categories themselves follow the same rules as those of Connections, which can vary quite a bit. Research examples of common category types in that game to understand the conventions that players expect.
Be clever! The best puzzles are the ones with red herrings, where two words that are not in the same category have something unrelated in common, suggesting a relationship between them, but no third word is present that would complete that set.
Before presenting your puzzle to me, double-check it thoroughly to ensure that all the requirements have been satisfied. Make sure each category has exactly three matching words, and that the hub word appears once in every category. Check for category specificity, accuracy, and overall puzzle cleverness.
Did Hank make this? Fun little game
oh I didn't get today's.
Was quite stuck on this group, never having had an apple device.Pre-Installed on iPhone
SAFARI · WALLET · FACETIME
As with Connections, sometimes the final group is just all the words you had no idea about.
I’ve shared this with several people and I’ve been playing it every day since it came out. But Hank has warned that he’s not going to support this game for very long. Since you can make your own levels and share them, it could last a while after he stops making them.
This is cute, but I keep running into a bug that's taking the cozy game from cute to rage inducing LOL. Oh well.Nvm am dumb :D
Kind of like a solo version of Codenames (boardgame).