NYT Connections 28 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 28 (#962) featured approachable word groupings with minimal trickery (Photo: NYT)
NYT Connections 28 January, 2026: NYT Connections has emerged as one of the internet's most addictive daily puzzles on the surface, the game is straightforward, but it rewards restraint, lateral thinking and pattern recognition. In order to test players ability to distinguish instinct from logic, the January 28 edition leans toward deception by combining commonplace items with abstract concepts.
The New York Times publishes a word-grouping puzzle called NYT Connections every day based on a common relationship, players must divide the sixteen words into four groups of four where each correct group is colored according to its level of difficulty, which ranges from manageable to purposefully challenging.
This puzzle’s difficulty lies in overlap. Words like rag and mock tempt players into false groupings, while the purple category demands phrase-level thinking rather than definition matching.
Puzzle #962 was difficult because of its balance although many words felt adaptable enough to fit in somewhere else, none of the categories were confusing. The trick was knowing when to trust structure over instinct and quit over analyzing, which was a recurrent theme in the hardest versions of the game.
