Newsweek is back for another day with the best tips and tricks to help you solve connections.

Wyna Liu is the brain behind the game and its editor. She told Newsweek how she develops the puzzle.

She creates the seven daily games herself each week, using ideas drawn from her daily life experiences. Liu keeps a neat spreadsheet of themes or word ideas, but a notebook is always handy when inspiration strikes.

This puzzle requires players to group 16 words into four categories based on their association.

“The game has evolved with solvers and responds to solvers’ experiences and expectations,” she explained in June, pointing out that she now sometimes “clumps” words together on the board, which might make people think they don’t belong together at all.

“Every board has to be made from scratch,” she said, explaining that when she sits down to build the week’s games, she consults her notebook and spreadsheet, which function like a “digital sketchpad.”

“Usually I don’t know where a board is going to go. It takes a really long time to fake things and try different angles,” Liu added.

The word game was created by The New York Times in June last year. Within a few months it became a true worldwide sensation and gave its stablemate Wordle a tough fight for his popularity.

“The response was truly incredible, overwhelming and unexpected,” said Liu Newsweek in June. “It’s exciting that something that is very close to my heart is resonating with people.”

Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and answers to the Saturday puzzle are towards the end of the article, so scroll carefully.

How to play “Connections”

This puzzle requires players to classify 16 words into four categories based on their association. For example, one game involved linking the words “clear,” “earn,” “make,” and “net,” all of which fell into the category “take home, as income.”

Each of the four categories is marked with a color that also indicates its level of difficulty. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue, and then purple. The puzzles are rarely easy, however, instead using homophones and wordplay, among other things, to keep things interesting.

The connecting themes can come from a variety of categories – from Halloween costumes to music genres.

When all four words in each sentence are placed correctly, those words are removed from the board. Each incorrect guess counts toward the error count. Up to four errors can be made before the game is over.

Players can shuffle and rearrange the board to make guessing the connections easier. To make things a little more difficult, sometimes a word can belong to more than one category – but there is only one correct answer.

‘Connections’ #426 Notes for Saturday, August 10

Yellow: Things that have the color of love.

Green: Nouns for things in use.

Blue: The programs of a famous computer company.

Purple: Films about real people.

‘Connections’ #426 Answer for Saturday, August 10

Yellow category: things that are red

Yellow words: Devil, Mars, Strawberry, Rose

Green category: Being in commission

Green words: Function, operate, execute, work

Blue Category: Microsoft Productions

Blue words: Edge, Office, Teams, Windows

Purple Category: Biographies

Purple words: Blonde, milk, vice, jobs

Did you guess the answers correctly? If so, congratulations. If not, there is no need to worry because there will be another opportunity to Connections tomorrow. One of the best things about the puzzle is seeing if you can improve your score over time.

Connections will be published at midnight in your local time zone and Newsweek I’ll be back tomorrow with another round of tips and hints.