Just like you, I'm obsessed with The New York Times' daily puzzle games. Unlike many of you, I'm playing them on a secret hard mode you might not know exists. Today, I'm going to reveal how you gain access to this super special secret mode – all you have to do is not be American.
The other day, the popular game Connections threw me for a loop by having not one but two categories out of four that contained US-specific references. In one of the categories, you needed to draw links between US cable channels; the other, American football positions.
This is just one example among many of how The New York Times makes it especially hard to play if you're a Brit like me, or any other non-American nationality for that matter. The global omnipresence of American culture has laid the groundwork to prepare many of us for challenges like this, but the point of the puzzles is to make them a challenge to everyone, US players included, often putting the answers even further out of my reach.
I have screenshots stretching back months in which I've hit a dead end by not knowing the name of a mayor of a US city in the Mini Crossword. Or I've been bamboozled by a category in Connections linking breakfast cereals that for legal reasons would never make it onto the shelf of a European supermarket. Or I've been made to feel like an idiot when I remember that the answer to that Wordle is obviously "mommy" – not, as we would say in my part of the world, "mummy."
(If you're ever in need of a helping hand with the daily NYT games, my colleague Gael Cooper has tip sheets on how to play Wordle, Connections and Strands just generally, as well as daily posts with hints and answers for each day's puzzles that you can find here.)
My Wordle advantage
Each puzzle presents its own distinct challenges to non-Americans, and to be fair to Wordle, it is one of the most universally accessible NYT games. You do have to remember to spell words in English (US), and here I have an advantage here over my fellow Brits. I write in US English every single day, as you see me doing here, and so most American spellings are already wired pretty deep into my brain.
The fill-in-the-blanks nature of the game makes it easier to remember to default to US spelling than Spelling Bee, where your brain is already working in overdrive to unravel every possible anagram. And then when you do realize you can use the word "traveler," it's one letter short of the UK version (traveller), which nets you fewer points.
Spelling Bee also brings the added, frustrating bonus of not recognizing words that are common in British parlance but that aren't known as well or at all in the US. Words like "lilo," for example, which is what we Brits call an air mattress, or "gaff," which is slang for your place of residence.
The Mini Crossword can be especially tricksy. It can lure you into a false sense of security, making you think this is another one you're going to complete in under a minute, when suddenly you'll be asked to name the host of a TV show you've never seen and you fall flat on your face. But at least with the Mini Crossword you can sometimes solve an impossible three across with a selection of easy down clues.
Connections is hard
The same can't be said of Connections. Connections might just be my favorite NYT game, even though the newspaper seems to have largely borrowed the concept from the hit British TV show Only Connect. But Connections is hard, and on a bad day I won't be able to complete it at all. The added complication of categories with concepts of which I boast no cultural appreciation can render the puzzle impossible.
The question of whether The New York Times should make its puzzles more accessible by eschewing distinctly American reference points has been a hot topic on Reddit over the years. Obviously, anyone signing up to the Times knows that while the paper's reach might be global, its target audience definitely isn't.
But then, The New York Times is gladly collecting subscription fees from people all over the world, so there's an argument that its puzzle makers should keep this in mind when challenging people to draw connections between NFL players who all have a color included in their surnames. One man felt so strongly that the NYT puzzles contained too many Americanisms that he wrote to the editor to express his frustration.
I personally enjoy playing the puzzles on secret beast mode: It makes me feel even smarter when I manage to get the answers correct. The New York Times now has a sports edition of Connections in beta, and I know that definitely won't be for me (I'd even balk at British sports version though). Would I appreciate fewer Americanisms overall? Sure, but I'd be equally amused by an "obscure British or Australian slang" category every now and then in Connections – little gift of acknowledgement from the NYT to those of us who persevere through the trickiest of puzzles in spite of our nationality.