Connections gives you sixteen Pokémon characters and asks you to sort them into four hidden groups of four. Nothing on the board tells you what the groups are; you work them out from what the characters have in common and submit four at a time.

The links come from the series rather than from trivia: gym leaders of one region, the Champions, Pokémon professors, coordinators, island kahunas, Team Rocket operatives, dragon-type specialists, characters who debuted in the same series, Ash's own Pokémon, trainers bonded with a legendary. The difficulty is that plenty of characters honestly belong to two of those at once, and only one of them is the group the puzzle wants.

Tap four portraits and press Submit. A correct group lifts out of the grid into a banner that names the category, and the twelve remaining tiles reshuffle into place. A wrong set flashes red and costs one of your five lives, without clearing your selection so you can swap a single character and try again.

You get two hints per board. A hint names one unsolved category outright — but not which four characters belong to it, so it turns a blind search into a targeted one rather than solving anything for you. There is also a Shuffle button, which only rearranges the tiles to break up how you are seeing the board.

Everyone plays the same board each day, laid out in the same order, and you get four attempts at it. Your score is the lives you have left when you finish, and the leaderboard also tracks how long you took.

Start with the group you are most sure of, even if it is not the one that looks easiest. Locking four characters removes them from every other group's candidate list, and that is worth more than being right about a group you were going to get anyway.

Count your candidates before submitting. If a category you have spotted has five or six plausible members, one of them belongs to a different group — that overlap is deliberate, and submitting before you have resolved it is the standard way to lose a life. Some boards plant a trap character on purpose.

Leave the group you understand least until last. Once three categories are locked, the fourth is whatever remains, so you can finish a board without ever working out what its final connection was.