The New York Times Connections puzzle for Sunday, October 18, 2026 asks players to divide 16 words into four groups of four.
Game 1225 mixes clothing storage, stick-shaped products, famous perfumes, and words built from terms linked to obscured air.
The categories follow the puzzle's color system, running from yellow as the easiest through green and blue to purple as the hardest.
All Four Categories in Game 1225
The clothing-storage group collects BUREAU, CHEST, TRUNK, and WARDROBE.
The stick-shaped items are BUTTER, DEODORANT, DYNAMITE, and INCENSE.
The perfume category brings together ANGEL, COCO, OBSESSION, and OPIUM.
The purple group relies on word beginnings tied to atmospheric conditions: FOGERTY opens with fog, HAZEL with haze, MISTER with mist, and VAPORETTO with vapor.
TechRadar's reviewer rated the puzzle hard and reported making one mistake.
The reviewer first weighed a possible nut connection among COCO, HAZEL, CHEST, and BUTTER, but that grouping did not fit the intended categories.
The reviewer also spotted ANGEL, OBSESSION, and OPIUM as perfume names but initially picked VAPORETTO instead of COCO.
Clearing the furniture category made the last eight words easier to connect.
In the standard format, correctly identified words vanish from the board, while wrong guesses count against a limit of four mistakes before the game ends.
Players can shuffle the grid to spot connections more easily.
The Times publishes Connections at midnight in each player's local time zone, and its companion coverage uses Eastern Standard Time dates.
That means players in different regions may see the same daily puzzle under different local calendar dates.
A Connections Bot also scores completed puzzles with a numerical assessment. Registered players can track puzzle history, win rate, perfect scores, and winning streaks through the Games section.
