NYT Connections 29 January, 2026: Sort 16 words into four groups with hints, categories and answers. Know how to play and solve today’s puzzle.
The NYT Connections puzzle for January 29 (#963) featured approachable word groupings with minimal trickery (Photo: NYT)
NYT Connections 29 January, 2026: NYT Connections has quietly become one of the most popular daily word games, attracting puzzle enthusiasts who crave something more than a quick five-letter answer on January 29, puzzle #963 offered a clever mix of fairy tale atmosphere, wordplay and pitfall constructions based on sound. Engagement data from NYT Games indicates that Connections has attracted millions of daily solvers with completion rates plummeting once purple-level logic enters the picture. Today’s grid is a great example of why Connections is a game that benefits from patience and a calm, steady hand.
NYT Connections is a daily word association puzzle published by The New York Times and players are given 16 words and must sort them into four groups of four based on a shared link where each group is colour-coded by difficulty, starting with yellow and moving through green and blue to purple, which is usually the trickiest unlike Wordle, this game tests lateral thinking and vocabulary depth rather than spelling alone.
This grid leaned heavily on misdirection. Words like SILVERSTEIN and FIBERGLASS looked unrelated until their shared endings surfaced. The purple group proved especially challenging, relying on phonetic similarity rather than definition, a tactic that regularly trips up even experienced players.
