Billboard Pops Up as Answer in Popular New York Times Connections Game

Billboard has been around since 1894 and is still going strong. In the last couple years, Billboard has been featured as a category in Jeopardy! (more than once), popped up in the HBO show The Last of Us and gotten a shout out from Kendrick Lamar on the remix to Beyoncé’s “America Has a Problem.” On Wednesday (Oct. 9), our long-running media brand added a new feather to its cap, thanks to The New York Times Games.

Warning: Spoiler ahead.

NYT Connections, one of the most popular fixtures of the NYT Games app, featured Billboard as an answer. For those who don’t play, Connections shows the user a grid of 16 items (usually single words rendered in all caps) and challenges them to make connections between four sets of four items, with varying levels of difficulty. Naturally, some of the words have double meanings, and oftentimes the similarities are cleverly (if not diabolically) masked. It’s a stimulating, addictive and occasionally frustrating game.

Wednesday’s puzzle featured 16 items, of which “Billboard” was one. By linking it to “Pitchfork,” “Spin” and “Mojo,” the category was revealed as “music publications.” The category was assigned the color blue, meaning it was the second-trickiest category of the Oct. 9, 2024, puzzle. According to the in-app Connections Bot, 3% of players solved the blue category first – so if you were one of them, consider yourself part of the music media intelligentsia.

For our part, we’re honored to be included an answer in the Gray Lady’s marvelous (and highly successful) collection of games.