PJ

Word Groups Hints: How to Find the Four Hidden Groups

MW

Mara Whitfield

PlayJoy strategy editor

Mara writes the how-to guides and spends an unreasonable amount of time optimising her own daily streaks. If a routine on this site works, it usually went through her first.

Published 2026-10-07 · Updated 2026-10-09 · 6 min read

A calm method for the Connections-style word game: sort by certainty, protect your mistakes, and use the colour order.

Word Groups gives you sixteen words and asks for four fours. The board is designed so that one group is obvious, one is tricky, and the rest sit in between. The skill is finding the obvious one first and not burning mistakes on the hard one too early.

Lock the easy group, then the overlaps

Scan for the group that jumps out — four words that are clearly fruits, or clearly months. Submit it. Then look for words that could belong to two groups; those are your danger tiles. Resolve them only after you have the safe groups banked.

The colour order is a difficulty ladder

Groups are ranked from easiest to hardest. If you have found three groups and the last four words feel random, they are the hardest group by design — and often the most abstract ("words that can follow ice"). Trust that the remaining four belong together even when the link is not obvious.

Spend mistakes on the hard group only

You get a small number of wrong guesses. Never waste one on a group you are already sure of. Save them for the moment you are torn between two plausible groupings of the same words.

FAQ

Is Word Groups a daily game?

It is an unlimited arcade game on PlayJoy, so you can replay it as many times as you like.

What does it train?

Verbal reasoning and creative thinking — the two dimensions no other arcade game covers here.

Put it into practice

Further reading

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