Connections Maker

Build your own NYT Connections-style puzzle and hand it to a friend with one link, no account, no server, nothing to sign up for.

The New York Times Connections puzzle is great, but there's exactly one a day and you can't make your own. I wanted to build a private puzzle for a friend's birthday (sixteen words, four hidden categories), and there was no clean way to do it without standing up an account system and a database to hold a few dozen words.

So I skipped the backend entirely. Connections Maker lets you author a puzzle in the browser and the whole thing (words, groups, labels, colors) gets packed into the share URL itself. There's no account to create, nothing stored on a server I run, and no link that quietly expires. You send the URL, the recipient opens it, and the puzzle is just there.

How it works

• Author four groups of four: give each group a category label and pick its difficulty color, from yellow for the gimmes up to purple for the trap.
• State lives in the URL: the puzzle is encoded into the link, so there's no backend, no database, and no login; the data travels with the link instead of sitting on a server.
• One-click sharing: generating a link shortens it through TinyURL and drops it on your clipboard, with the full encoded URL copied as a fallback if the shortener is down.
• Play it like the real thing: open a shared link and you get the familiar grid: pick four words you think belong together, with a limited number of mistakes before the puzzle ends.
• Nothing to install: it's a static site on GitHub Pages, so creating and playing both happen entirely client-side in the browser.

Stack

React · TypeScript · Vite, deployed as a static build to GitHub Pages. The puzzle is serialized into the share URL and TinyURL handles shortening, there is no server-side code, so there's nothing to run, scale, or pay for.