Looplink

Where Looplink comes from

The grouping game has a television pedigree. Its modern ancestor is the Connecting Wall from Only Connect, the BBC quiz show that debuted in 2008: sixteen clues, four hidden groups, and a wall that only came apart if you saw past the deliberate red herrings. The format leapt from broadcast to browser in June 2023, when the New York Times launched Connections, built by puzzle editor Wyna Liu — and within months the four-groups-of-four grid was a morning ritual to rival the crossword. Every version of that puzzle makes a quiet promise: each word ultimately belongs to exactly one group. Looplink breaks the promise on purpose. Four of its words genuinely belong to two groups at once, which is why its board holds twelve tiles rather than sixteen — eight words owned outright, four shared between neighbors — and why its four categories don't sit in separate piles but chain into a closed ring, each group holding hands with the next. The wall became a loop, and the red herrings became load-bearing.

How to get better at Looplink

Start with the arithmetic. Every group is exactly two words it owns outright plus two links it shares, so a foursome where all four words fit one theme and nothing else is a foursome you've misread. When a candidate group feels too clean, that's the tell — go find which two of its words are moonlighting.

Sort the twelve by ambiguity. Words that read one way only are the spine of their groups; words that plausibly fit two themes are your link candidates. Spend your first minute doing nothing but this sort — eight spine words plus four suspects, mapped before any submission, is the position from which the loop falls apart quickly.

Build the ring before you guess. Links join neighboring groups, so your four suspects also tell you the seating order — if one word straddles themes A and B, those themes are adjacent, and the group across the ring from A can't share anything with it. When your suspected links imply an impossible seating, one of your theme readings is wrong, and you've learned it for free.

Spend mistakes like money. You get four, and resubmitting a foursome you've already tried costs nothing — never lose one to a forgotten repeat. And once three groups are down, the fourth is fully determined, so a final-group miss is the one error the game will never forgive.

Let the scoring set your order. The bonuses pay for nerve: opening with the purple group, leading with link words, walking the ring counterclockwise, finishing inside two minutes. Hoarding the links until the end draws the game's one true penalty — wrestle the shared words early, because they're the puzzle.

A round in the life

Twelve words, read twice before you touch anything. Nine settle into obvious camps; three keep flickering — one reads as both a card game and a dance, another as a knot or a pastry. Flickering is the tell: probable links. If the card games and the dances share that word, they're neighbors on the ring, and your two hardest themes must sit adjacent too — which places every group before you've submitted once. So you go for the bonus: purple first, its two spine words plus the two flickerers, and the tiles lock. The ring is seated now, and the rest is bookkeeping — counterclockwise, for style, with ninety seconds still on the clock. The loop closes the way a good proof does: all at once, and in hindsight, inevitably.