Bird Connections 🧩

How it works

• You're shown a 4×4 grid of 16 UK bird species names.
• Pick exactly four you think belong to a theme — submit. If right, that group locks in with its colour band.
• Groups are colour-coded by difficulty: 🟨 yellow (easiest), 🟩 green, 🟦 blue, 🟪 purple (trickiest — usually word-play or unexpected category).
• You get four mistakes total. Run out and the game ends.
• Solve all four groups = up to +15 bonus points (depending on mistakes).

Example puzzle (yesterday's)

Themes (revealed after solving):

• 🟨 Garden visitors — Robin, Blackbird, Blue Tit, House Sparrow
• 🟩 UK owls — Tawny, Barn, Little, Long-eared
• 🟦 Cliff-nesting seabirds — Puffin, Gannet, Razorbill, Kittiwake
• 🟪 Birds named after their call — Cuckoo, Chiffchaff, Curlew, Hoopoe

What makes Connections work for birders

Birding lends itself perfectly to grouping puzzles because so many natural categories exist — species families, habitats, migration timing, plumage features, conservation status. The "purple" tier in particular shines when the connection is non-obvious: birds named after their call, place-name eponyms, exactly-5-letter species, fish-catchers. Solving it teaches a category you might not have noticed before — that's the daily-puzzle dopamine the format is famous for.

How the daily puzzle is built

Each day, the game picks one of our pre-curated puzzle sets deterministically (same puzzle for everyone). Sets are hand-crafted so the 16 species form four mutually-exclusive groups of four. We've launched with 10 days of unique puzzles and will keep adding more.