The New York Times' Connections puzzle returned Wednesday with its 1,123rd edition, a grid that puzzle trackers widely described as one of the trickier challenges of the week, built around a deliberate web of overlapping themes involving woodworking, literature, guitar technique and classic phrase completion.

Connections, edited by Wyna Liu, asks players to sort 16 words into four groups of four based on a shared theme, with categories color-coded by difficulty from yellow, the easiest, through green and blue, up to purple, typically the most conceptually demanding. Players are allowed four incorrect guesses before the puzzle ends, and the game has grown into one of the Times' most widely played daily offerings, trailing only Wordle in overall popularity among the publication's expanding suite of word and logic games.

Wednesday's grid featured the following 16 words: GRATE, PLANE, SHAVE, SLIVER, DRIFT, PLOT, THEME, THREAD, PICK, PLUCK, STRUM, TAP, CARDS, LORDS, WAX and WORSHIP. According to multiple outlets that covered the puzzle, the grid was constructed with an unusually high density of deliberate misdirection, with several words plausibly fitting more than one category depending on how a solver initially interpreted them.

For those seeking a nudge before diving into the full solution, outlets circulated general hints without revealing the specific groupings. The yellow category was described as referring to verbs or tools that produce very thin pieces of something. The green category was hinted at as words describing a recurring or central idea within a work, often in a literary or narrative sense. The blue category was described as four........

© International Business Times