I play Wordle, Connections and other NYT puzzles in Secret Beast mode

Like you, I’m obsessed with the New York Times daily puzzles. Unlike many of you, I play it in a secret hard mode that you may not know exists. Today I’m going to reveal how you can access this very special secret mode – you just don’t have to be an American.

Recently, the popular game “Connections” amazed me because it contained not one, but two of four categories that contained US-specific references. In one of the categories you had to make connections between US cable channels; the others, American football positions.

This is just one example of many of how The New York Times makes it particularly difficult to play if you’re British, like me, or have another non-American nationality. The global omnipresence of American culture has laid the foundation to prepare many of us for challenges like these, but the point of the puzzles is to make them a challenge for everyone, including US players, often making the answers even further are out of my reach.

I have screenshots from months of hitting a dead end because I didn’t know the name of a mayor of a US city in the mini crossword puzzle. Or I was confused by a category in Connections about breakfast cereals that would never make it onto the shelf of a European supermarket for legal reasons. Or I feel like an idiot when I think that the answer to that word is obviously “mommy” – and not, as we would say in my part of the world, “mama”.

(If you ever need help with the daily NYT games, my colleague Gael Cooper has tips for playing Wordle, Connections, and Strands in general, as well as daily posts with tips and answers for each day’s puzzles that you can find here.)

My Wordle advantage

Each puzzle presents its own unique challenges to non-Americans, and to be fair to Wordle, it is one of the most widely accessible NYT games. You have to remember to spell words in English (US), and this is where I have an advantage over my fellow Brits. I write in US English every day, as you do here, and so most American spellings are already pretty deeply ingrained in my brain.

The game’s fill-in-the-blank feature makes it easier to remember standard US spelling than Spelling Bee, where your brain is already working at full speed to puzzle out every possible anagram. And then when you realize you can use the word “Traveler,” it’s one less letter missing than the British version (Traveler), which gives you fewer points.

Spelling Bee also comes with the additional, frustrating benefit of not recognizing words that are common in British usage but are not as well known or not known at all in the US. Words like “Lilo”, which is what we Brits call an air mattress, or “Gaff”, which is slang for where you live, for example.

The mini crossword puzzle can be particularly tricky. It can give you a false sense of security and make you think that this is another show you’ll finish in less than a minute when you’re suddenly asked to name the host of a TV show you’ve never seen you fall flat on your face. But at least with the mini crossword puzzle you can sometimes solve an impossible question of three with a selection of simple clues.

Connections are difficult

The same does not apply to connections. “Connections” might just be my favorite NYT game, even though the paper seems to have borrowed the concept largely from the hit British TV show “Only Connect.” But “Connections” is difficult and on a bad day I can’t do it at all. Further complicating categories with concepts I don’t culturally appreciate can make the puzzle impossible.

The question of whether The New York Times should make its puzzles more accessible by eschewing distinctly American references has been a hot topic on Reddit over the years. Obviously, anyone who signs up for the Times knows that while the paper may have a global reach, its audience is definitely not global.

But then again, The New York Times likes to collect subscription fees from people all over the world, so there’s an argument that its puzzle creators should keep that in mind when challenging people to make connections between NFL players whose last names all contain a color . One man felt so strongly that the NYT puzzles contained too many Americanisms that he wrote to the editor to express his frustration.

Personally, I enjoy playing the puzzles in Secret Beast mode: I feel even smarter when I manage to find the right answers. The New York Times now has a sports edition of Connections in beta, and I know it definitely won’t be for me (I’d shy away from even the UK sports version, though). Would I welcome fewer Americanisms overall? Sure, but I would also be amused every now and then by the “obscure British or Australian slang” category in “Connections” – a little NYT thank you to those of us who, despite our nationality, solve the trickiest puzzles.