And unless they've improved it, NY Connections doesn't have nearly enough red-herrings to be interesting.

The difficulty with the Only Connect wall is that you can have 5 sets of 5 or more in each, and sometimes can have loads that could fit a category, e.g. you might have 7 or 8 Pixar Movies listed.

You know that's going to be a category, but you also know it's a waste of time to try them before finding other categories.

There's also linguistic and add/drop letter ones, so if you see "Soul", that might actually be "Capitols missing a letter", "Stars with an extra letter", or "Homophones of Fish".

But it might be straight, so could fit "Davids", "Pixar Movies", etc.

There is a meta-pattern, you typically only have one such missing/add letter group on a wall, and you typically have one "Names" (often common firstname) set. Places in general also feature very regularly, especially with missing parts.

Fully solving most walls in the time limit is extremely challenging. It's slightly easier for the home viewer on the second wall, because there are often common themes across the two walls, but of course the competitors don't get that help.

NYT Connections definitely has less red herrings than Only Connect's wall (and doesn't have the pressure of the timer, either...), but the quality has gone up significantly in the past year and half.

If anyone wants to try, I actually built a command line player of the NYT Connections game here: https://github.com/jleclanche/connections-tui (for some definition of the word "I") -- you can jump by date and easily compare.