How to Play Poke Connections

Poke Connections is a free, fan-made browser puzzle: 16 Pokemon names, four hidden groups, four lives. It is not affiliated with NYT Connections, Nintendo, The Pokemon Company, or Pokennection. These are the rules of this site. Other sites in the same genre disagree, and the table below keeps that disagreement.

The round

You see 16 names in a 4 by 4 grid. Select four that share a category. A correct set locks, turns its colour, and leaves the grid. Yellow is the broadest group I could build that day, then green, then blue, then purple. Order is the difficulty label, not a hint about Pokemon types.

A wrong set costs one life. If your four names include exactly three from one remaining group, the board says one away. Four lost lives ends the round and opens every group. There is no timer.

What a category can be

Every group is a property in the public Pokedex extract: primary type, second type, generation, body colour, first letter, evolution stage, legendary, mythical, baby, or one evolution line. I do not write joke categories or copied daily themes from another site.

A name can look like it fits two stories. Charizard is a frequent example in public write-ups because Fire and Flying both describe it. On this site I reject a board when a second complete set of four groups from the supported category properties also covers all 16 names. A tempting extra tile can remain. That is the one-away case.

Sharing a result

Use the board’s Share result control for a spoiler-free result grid. For a past daily, link to its date selector on the month archive page. Archived names stay behind a reveal control.

Colours follow the genre order yellow, green, blue, purple. NYT Connections uses that order too, which is one reason the names get confused. The tiles here are Pokemon names, not English words.