Aaron E. Lewis
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03 — GAME

The anti-Connections game.

NYT Connections asks you to find four groups of four matching words. Don't Connect asks the opposite: build four new groups that each contain exactly one word from every hidden category — without ever accidentally matching one by mistake.

STACK: VANILLA HTML / CSS / JS
STATUS: LIVE — PLAYABLE BELOW
ROLE: DESIGN & BUILD
01

Play it

Having trouble in-frame? Open it in its own tab.

02

How it works

Inverted objective

Instead of matching four-of-a-kind, every correct guess is a "rainbow" — one word from each of the four hidden categories, locked in and removed from the board.

Mistake budget

Guessing two or more words from the same hidden category costs a mistake, Connections-style — four mistakes and it's over.

No early feedback

Solved groups stay color-blind until the game ends, so locking one in doesn't leak which words share a category.

Shareable result

A Connections-style emoji grid you can copy or share, one row per guess — a run of four different colors means a rainbow, a repeat means a mistake.

03

Stack

Static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript — no framework, no build step, no dependencies. Game state persists per day in localStorage the way NYT's own dailies do.

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Vanilla JavaScript
  • localStorage
04

Notes

  • Puzzles rotate through a small built-in bank, keyed off the day of year, the same way the real Connections picks a new puzzle daily.