Now, the game will show up in The Athletic app, where the Feb. 9 Connections: Sports Edition game will be Super Bowl-themed.

Sports fans may already be playing the New York Times’ Connections: Sports Edition daily puzzle, which the newspaper has been offering in beta since September. But on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9, the game is moving out of beta. The Connections: Sports Edition puzzle that day will be Super Bowl-themed, as a tribute to that day’s game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. 

But don’t look for Connections: Sports Edition in the New York Times Games app. Instead, it will appear in The Athletic app in both the iOS App Store and Google Play, for Android devices. That’s because the game is a partnership between the Times and The Athletic, its subscription-based sports journalism site. Puzzles are written by The Athletic’s managing editor for news, Mark Cooper.

Connections: Sports Edition also will remain available on The Athletic’s site for anyone to play without a subscription.

CNET posts daily hints and answers for Connections: Sports Edition, regular Connections, Wordle, Strands and the NYT Mini Crossword.

Read more: How to Watch the Super Bowl Without Cable

Connections: Sports Edition is like the newspaper’s popular online game Connections, where you look at a grid with 16 words and try to match them up into four categories. But you’d better know at least a little about a wide variety of sports to play Connections: Sports Edition. All the words are sports related, and the categories range from general terms about sports to superspecific trivia, such as “rookie quarterbacks to reach the conference championship” in the NFL.

Like regular Connections, Connections: Sports Edition loves to play with words, so you might find four words that all have “Super” as a prefix, or “Block” as a suffix. And the editors lean heavy on “teams that are all from this certain city,” or “colleges that are all in this certain conference,” or “teams in various sports and cities that share a mascot.” So it helps if your sports knowledge isn’t limited to your own home city, state or conference.

Read more: Super Bowl 2025: How to Watch the Halftime Show With Megastar Kendrick Lamar

And since the Times is a US newspaper, this is a puzzle heavily slanted towards American sports, although occasionally a category about the English Premier League or an international tennis tournament makes it through. The puzzle also occasionally throws team logos or athlete photos into the puzzle, so you need to have some visual knowledge of sports as well.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Delivers a Real Challenge, Even to Sports Fans

Your skill at Connections: Sports Edition depends on your knowledge of the sports being included that day, but here are three of the categories I’ve found especially tough in recent days.

No. 1: Homophones of NBA player names, Jan. 26. Answers: Barns, Connect, Heart and Hero.

No. 2: WNBA MVPs, Jan. 21. Answers: Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles and Stewart.

No. 3: Premier League team nicknames, Jan. 17. Answers: Bees, Cherries, Foxes and Hammers.