How to play Connecthing

The idea

Connecthing pins two unrelated things to a cork board: one card at the top, one at the bottom, and a whole lot of nothing in between. Your job is to type the things that link them, one at a time, until the two strings of red thread meet.

Say the cards are cat and moon. You might type witch. A witch goes with a cat. Then Halloween, because a witch goes with Halloween. Then werewolf, which belongs to Halloween. Then moon, because a werewolf howls at the moon. Every one of those steps is a link most people would accept without argument, and that is the whole game: the chain is made of unremarkable steps, not clever leaps.

Each thing you type becomes a pinned note. It is coloured by how useful it turned out to be, a red line is drawn to the note it attached to, and a small tag explains itself — something like "witch · goes with · cat". The board is a conspiracy wall by the time you are done, and every line on it has a reason printed next to it.

The both-ends rule

This is the rule that decides whether a guess counts. There are two strings on the board: one hanging from the top card and one rising from the bottom card. A guess has to link to one of those two strings.

Strings can branch. A new note does not have to attach to the most recent guess — it can attach to anything already joined to either card, which means a good early guess keeps paying off as the board grows.

Type something that links to neither string and it does not count as progress. It is shown as ⬛, struck through, and dropped into a "Didn't link" tray. It is not deleted — once the strings have grown, you can pick it up and try it again.

What the colours mean

The board knows the shortest route between the two cards, so it can tell you how much good a note did. If the shortest possible chain is D links long:

Red notes are not mistakes. A red detour is a genuine connection and it can still end up part of your winning chain — it just took a longer way round. Strikethrough is reserved for the black ones that did not connect at all.

Par, guesses and strikes

Par is the fewest things that can sit between the two cards. A par-3 board can be solved with three guesses in between, and that number is derived from the map itself, so it can never disagree with the puzzle.

Your score is the number of guesses you used, and fewer is better. There is no cap on guesses — you can keep going as long as you are making progress. What you cannot do is wander off the board:

• A guess that does not link to either string is a strike (⬛).
• Three strikes on a daily, practice or tutorial board and the board is lost.
• In Endless you get one pool of five strikes for the entire run, and the run ends when the pool is empty.
• A word that is not in the map costs nothing. You will be told it "isn't in our word map (yet)". That is not your mistake and it is not punished — and it is genuinely useful, because words people type that the game does not know get added.

Typing, matching and suggestions

Capitalisation, spaces and hyphens are all ignored, so "Ice-Cream", "ice cream" and "icecream" are the same guess. The game then checks a list of aliases — irregular plurals, American and British spellings, common synonyms — and finally strips a plain plural ending, so you do not have to guess the exact form the map prefers.

After two letters, up to five matching words appear as suggestions, shortest first. Tapping one guesses it. If you are not sure a word is in the game at all, typing it is cheap: unknown words cost nothing.

The daily board

One pair of cards per UTC day, the same for everyone. Weekday dailies are par 3, weekend dailies are par 4. The board is numbered, and the daily opens on 24 November 2026; until then Endless is playable and the daily card on the homepage counts down to it.

• Your first finish of the day is your official result. Later plays that day are practice.
• Your result shares as something like Connected in 5 (par 3) · 1 ⬛ — and the two cards are the hook, so the things in between are never spoiled in the share text.
• Your streak counts consecutive days you finished the daily, stored in your browser.

Endless mode

Endless runs boards back to back. The first two are par 2, boards 3 to 5 are par 3, and everything after that is par 4. There are no lives per board; the five-strike pool has to last the whole run, which turns a careless guess into a real cost. Your score is the number of boards solved, and no word is reused as a card twice in the same run.

The very first time you open the game you get a gentle par-1 board — bee to toast, by way of honey — after a short four-point explanation.

Habits that help

1. Start with the most obvious association, not the cleverest. The map rewards ordinary links. If you have to argue for it, it is probably not on a shortest route.
2. Work from both ends. The both-ends rule means a guess that gets you nowhere from the top card may be exactly the right step up from the bottom one.
3. Trust the colours as a compass. Green means keep pushing that direction. Orange is a nudge to look for a shortcut elsewhere. Red means the link was real but there is a shorter way, so do not build on it unless you have to.
4. Guess rather than deliberate. Guesses are unlimited and only failures to link are punished, so a wrong-but-connected guess costs you nothing but the number in your score. An unknown word costs literally nothing.
5. Save the hint for the middle. You get one per puzzle and it counts as a guess. It pins the furthest useful thing along a shortest route, which is worth far more once the board is half built than at the start.
6. Revisit the "Didn't link" tray. A connection that made no sense early often becomes obvious once the strings have grown towards each other.

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