ericbotti/connections-puzzles

Connections Puzzles Dataset

A high-quality dataset of 9,525 puzzle games scraped from PuzzGrid, similar to the popular New York Times Connections game.

Each puzzle has a set of words which the goal is to group into evenly sized categories based on common themes or connections. Additionally the player may guess the category theme for extra points.

Overview

• Total Puzzles: 9,525

• Data Splits: Three splits (10.4%, 79.3%, 10.3%), stratified by difficulty rating

  • train_sft: 990 puzzles, designated for supervised fine-tuning, see full game examples dataset

  • train_rl: 7,554 puzzles for reinforcement learning, see verifiers rl environment

  • test: 981 puzzles, for testing/evaluation

• Quality Filter: All puzzles have quality rating ≥ 4.0/5.0

• Average Quality: 4.12/5.0

• Average Difficulty: 3.60/5.0

• Creators: 2,559 unique puzzle creators

Dataset Statistics

Metric	Train SFT	Train RL	Test	Total
Count	990	7,554	981	9,525
Percentage	10.4%	79.3%	10.3%	100.0%
Avg Difficulty	3.61	3.60	3.60	3.60
Avg Quality	4.12	4.12	4.12	4.12
Unique Creators	496	2,201	525	2,559

Difficulty Bin Breakdown

Bin	Train SFT	Train RL	Test	Total
0-2	0	2	0	2
2-3	79	563	85	727
3-4	725	5,694	713	7,132
4-4.5	170	1,154	166	1,490
4.5-5.0	16	141	17	174

Top Countries

Country	Train SFT	Train RL	Test	Total
GB	717	5,496	685	6,898
US	140	1,168	159	1,467
AU	53	344	56	453
CA	19	155	18	192
IE	13	77	13	103

Structure

Each puzzle record contains three categories of information:

Basic Metadata

• puzzle_id: Unique identifier for the puzzle

• creator: PuzzGrid username of puzzle creator

• difficulty: Difficulty rating (0.0-5.0)

• quality: Quality rating (≥4.0 for all puzzles)

• country: Country code associated with puzzle (GB, US, AU, etc.)

• created_at: Puzzle creation timestamp in UTC (ISO 8601 format)

• tags: List of associated tags

Puzzle Content

• title: Puzzle title (if provided)

• all_words: Complete list of words to be grouped

• num_groups: Number of groups in the puzzle

• grid_size: Dimensions (e.g., "4x4", "5x5", "6x6")

Solution Data

• group_words: List of word lists, one for each group

• group_themes: Descriptive themes/categories assosciated with each group

• group_linking_terms: Keywords/characters used to determine if a player guessed a category correctly.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite:

@dataset{connections_puzzles_2025,
  title={Connections Puzzles Dataset},
  author={Eric Botti},
  year={2025},
  url={https://huggingface.co/datasets/ericbotti/connections-puzzles}
}