Sports and games go hand in hand.
First, sports are games, but even if you relate to sports more as a fan than as an athlete, your passion will almost certainly be expressed in competitive ways.
As fans, we analyze and consume sports endlessly long after the game on the field is over. We watch highlights, read about and debate the results. We play sports video games like Madden, NBA2K and Football Manager (my personal favorite). And we create games within games, from fantasy sports to pub trivia to everyday conversations to competitions between friends.
So today we are happy to bring you another outlet for your fandom.
Connections: Sports Edition is The Athletic’s first game, and we’re opening it up to daily beta testing starting this week for your feedback and (hopefully) fun. We designed the game in partnership with the team at The New York Times Games, creators of our fantastic flagship game, Connections. Combining their puzzle prowess with The Athletic’s sports expertise has resulted in a game that will be familiar to Connections players, but with a twist: added sports trivia and imagery.
The game is free to play here, and we’ll be posting a new game board every day over the next few weeks.
Putting together a game board is a fun challenge: making connections and overlaps between sports terms, sometimes across multiple sports. My group of four watches, reads, and thinks about sports. As I watch the games now, word associations pop up and often spark new ideas. For example, can I make a connection between London, the city, and Drake London? Or is there a way to connect a Golden State Warriors star player (Draymond Green) with an area of a golf course (putting green)? When I get an idea, I write it down and see if I can build a game board around those overlapping terms.
As you can see from the beta gameboard, sometimes an idea comes together, and other times, like when I tried to pair the Charlotte Hornets and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets with two other teams, the kernel of an idea just disappears (or remains in a notebook for now).
The inclusion of players and teams adds a trivia element that will be a fun challenge for sports fans. We’ve also added a timer to the game to add another competitive element. We look forward to your feedback.
If you get stuck and need a hint, we’re here to help: Your Connections: Sports Edition Coach will provide you with hints in all categories every morning.
Have fun playing!
How to play
The object of the game is to group 16 words or objects into groups of four as quickly as possible based on commonalities within each group. Try to find the groups without making four mistakes.
There is only one answer to each puzzle, so be wary of words or items that seem to belong to more than one category.
Examples of categories:
Sports ____: fans, cars, bars, radio
US Summer Olympians: Biles, Phelps, Ledecky, Lyles
Each category group is assigned a color that becomes clear as you solve it: easy (yellow), medium (green), hard (blue), and difficult (purple). Of course, these group rankings are subject to interpretation, so we want to hear what you think! Please send us your feedback by clicking the (?) button in the gameplay menu or by emailing us directly at feedback-connections-sports-edition@theathletic.com.
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(Illustration by Dan Goldfarb/The Athletic; Photos by Chris Unger/Getty Images, Robbie Jay Barratt/AMA via Getty, Kenny Jara/NBAE via Getty)
