Games
Introducing Looplink: Connections, Bent Into a Loop
Meet Looplink, our daily word-grouping puzzle where four shared link tiles chain the four groups into a closed loop. How it works, scoring, and a tip.
If you have played every grid-of-sixteen connection puzzle out there and started to feel the edges of the format, Looplink is the next turn of the screw. It looks familiar at a glance: sixteen words, four hidden groups, find the connections. Then you notice the twist hiding in the name, and the whole thing tilts.
The catch is that four of those sixteen words do double duty. Each one belongs to two groups at once, so the categories do not sit in tidy little boxes. They chain together into a closed loop, each group sharing a word with the one beside it. The word you are sure anchors one group might be the very tile that completes the group next door.
How Looplink works
You get sixteen words that sort into four hidden categories of four. Tap four words you think share a theme, then submit. Solve all four groups to close the loop. You only get four mistakes before the day is over, so a wild guess is expensive.
Four of the words are links. A link belongs to two neighboring groups at the same time, which is why the four groups form a ring instead of four separate piles. A link tile stays a single color until both of its groups are solved, and only then does it split to show both, so you often will not know a word was a shared link until the picture fills in around it.
Color is difficulty
Each group has a color, and the color tells you how hard it is meant to be. Yellow is the easiest, then green, then blue, with purple as the hardest. That ramp gives you a natural opening: the easy group is usually the safe first guess. It also sets up one of the best scoring plays, which is doing the exact opposite.
Scoring rewards nerve and elegance
Every solve starts at 100 points, and each mistake costs 15. From there the bonuses reward style rather than mere completion. Lead with the link words instead of saving them, and you earn a Link Lead. Crack the hardest group before the easiest, going hard to easy, and you earn Hats Off. Travel the ring counterclockwise from any starting color for a Rebel Yell. Finish under 120 seconds, or better yet under 90, for a speed bonus, plus a point for every day of your current streak. A top game lands around 200 points.
There is a flip side. Play it the timid way, parking every link until the very end, and the game docks you hard. The links are the spine of the puzzle, and Looplink wants you to wrestle with them, not dodge them.
One tip to start
Hunt for the links early. Look for a word that plausibly fits two different themes, because that ambiguity is usually the tell that it is a shared tile rather than a clean member of one group. Pinning down a link does double work: it locks in part of two groups at once, and it sets you up for the Link Lead bonus. Resist the urge to bank the easy yellow group first and call it safe. The loop is more forgiving when you understand its joints.
Looplink is live now. Find the first link, close the loop, and see how clean a solve you can post.
