Connections gives you sixteen Attack on Titan characters and four hidden groups of four. Every character belongs to exactly one group, and your job is to find all four groupings — Titan shifters, regiments, families, shared traits — without burning through your lives.

The difficulty is deliberate overlap. A character who obviously belongs with the Survey Corps may actually be needed for a family group, and the puzzle is built so that the tempting four is usually not the correct four. Getting all four groups clean, with no mistakes, is genuinely hard.

Select four characters you believe share a category and submit them. If the four are right, the group locks in with its category revealed and disappears from the board.

If they are wrong, you lose a life. You have a small number of lives for the whole puzzle, so a guess you are not reasonably confident about is expensive.

The puzzle is solved when all four groups have been found, and it changes daily, so everyone is working through the same sixteen characters on the same day.

Start from the group you can name, not from the four characters that look related. If you can say out loud what the category is — Warriors, the 104th, one family — you are far less likely to be looking at a trap.

Find the characters that fit two categories and set them aside. The puzzle is usually built around them, and once you know which group actually needs them, the rest of the board resolves quickly.

When you are down to eight characters and two groups, look for the odd one out rather than the pattern. Spotting the single character who cannot belong tells you the split immediately.