Play a Connections-style word puzzle with friends

Disconnections is a daily word-grouping puzzle made to be played together. Sixteen words, four hidden groups, one board a day. Open it in a Discord channel or call and everybody there gets that same board, with their grids filling in next to yours while you solve.

Free, no account, and today's board is playable right on the homepage.

What the game is

Every day there is one board: sixteen words in a four-by-four grid, hiding four groups of four. Pick four words you think belong together and submit. Get it right and the group locks in with its colour and leaves the grid. Get it wrong four times and the board closes on you.

The difficulty is never the vocabulary. It's that most of the sixteen words look like they belong in two groups at once, and only one arrangement satisfies all four. The board that looks obvious in the first ten seconds is usually the one built to catch you.

Every board is written and edited in-house, one a day, by people who play them. Somebody chooses which word sits in the wrong group on purpose, and somebody decides how far the last group is allowed to go. If you're new to this kind of puzzle, the full rules are on the how to play page.

The multiplayer part

Most word games answer “can I play this with friends?” with “send them the link and compare screenshots afterwards.” That isn't really playing together. Launch Disconnections in a channel or a voice call and this is what you get instead:

• The same board for everyone. One puzzle a day, and every person in the room is looking at that same sixteen words. Nobody is racing a different problem.
• Grids that fill in live. Beside your board is a rail of everyone playing. When a friend cracks a group, their little grid paints that row in front of you, and you can see them closing in before they say anything.
• Mistakes and times, side by side. Each row carries the dots for the guesses that player has left and the clock they finished on, so a clean solve and a scraped-through-on-the-last-life solve read differently.
• Seasons and streaks. The leaderboard keeps two windows, this season and all-time, and the server carries a solve streak for every consecutive day somebody in it cracks the board.
• A nightly recap. The bot posts yesterday's results back into the channel: who solved it, how fast, where the standings landed, and whether the streak survived.

You don't have to take turns and you don't all have to be online at once, though the version people end up playing is a call with the board open and someone insisting the purple group is unfair.

How to start it in your server

Disconnections is a Discord Activity, so it opens inside Discord instead of sending everyone to a website. In any text channel, open the app launcher next to the message box and pick Disconnections. In a voice call, it's under the activities button. You can also open the app page in Discord's directory and launch it from there, or add it to a server so the recap and the slash commands come along.

Whoever launches it opens the room; everyone else in the channel joins the board that's already running. Nobody has to install anything of their own.

Or just play today's board here

If you want to try it before you put it in front of a server, today's real board is playable free on the homepage. No account, no Discord, no email. A browser run stays in your browser and doesn't post a score anywhere, which is the one thing the Discord version has that the page can't: other people on the leaderboard.

Questions people ask

Can you play Connections-style puzzles with friends online?

Yes. Launch Disconnections in a Discord channel or voice call and everyone there plays the same daily board in the same room, with each other's grids filling in live and one leaderboard for the times.

Is it free?

Yes. The daily board is free to play in Discord and free in the browser. There is no account to make and nothing to buy to play the daily.

Do we all get the same puzzle?

Yes. There is one board a day and every player gets that same board, which is what makes the times and the mistake counts worth comparing.

Does it work on phones?

Yes. Activities run inside the Discord mobile app on iOS and Android, and the browser board on disconnections.app is built for a phone screen too.

Do you need to install a bot?

Not to play. Anyone can open the Activity in a channel without adding anything to the server. Adding the app is what turns on the nightly recap post and the slash commands.