I’ve played nearly every NYT Connections.

The core game is rock solid, but category colors sap some of the joy. To maximize your score, you’re supposed to submit categories from purple to yellow. But:

• After spotting an easy category, I waste mental energy filtering it out.
• When I’ve solved the whole thing in my head, I must still guess which category is which color.
• I use grayscale devices.

Here are some proposals to fix these frustrations.

Let me select more than four tiles

Right now, when you reach four selected tiles, the Submit button is enabled and no further tiles may be selected.

Instead, continue allowing tiles to be selected above four, but disable the Submit button whenever there aren’t exactly four tiles selected.

Then I could select all of the tiles that I have categorized, and easily focus on what remains.

Add Gather

The Gather button gathers exactly four selected tiles to the top row, just like the Submit button, except that it doesn’t check for correctness and doesn’t Submit.

Then I could Gather my categories one at a time as I find them.

Add Submit All

Once there is a Gather button, or drag-and-drop, or any other non-Submit way to organize tiles, add a Submit All button. This succeeds only if every row is a category; otherwise it fails outright. It is available only when no categories have been Submitted yet.

This removes any guesswork, and by being all-or-nothing, raises the stakes.

Add non-color affordances

Even small visual clues would make a big difference.