Create a Puzzle
Pick four categories and four Pokémon for each. The Pokédex is right here to filter — by type, generation, colour or evolution stage — and the builder checks as you go that your puzzle has exactly one valid answer. Anyone can build one; publishing needs an account.
What makes a good Connections puzzle
A good puzzle has exactly one valid answer and at least one convincing wrong turn. If your four categories share no Pokémon at all, players will sort the board in a single pass and feel nothing. If they share too many, the board stops being solvable by reasoning and starts being solvable by guessing.
Order your four groups from easiest to hardest. That order is what players see as the yellow, green, blue and purple bars when they solve, and it is what the shared result grid encodes.
The one mistake worth avoiding
If a Pokémon on your board fits two of your categories, your puzzle has a second valid answer — and a player who finds it will be told they are wrong. This is the single most common way a hand-made puzzle breaks, and it is easy to miss: Generation I and Unevolved, for example, overlap enormously.
The builder checks for this as you go and hides the risky picks by default, so you can concentrate on choosing categories that are actually interesting.
Building one, start to finish
- Pick a filter for the first group and tap four Pokémon. The category name fills itself in, and the focus jumps to the next group on its own.
- Repeat for the other three. Safe picks stay on by default, so anything that would give your puzzle a second answer never appears in the pool.
- Order the four groups from easiest to hardest. That order is what players see as the yellow, green, blue and purple bars, and it is what the shared result grid encodes.
- Watch the check panel. Green means one valid answer and a healthy amount of misdirection; red names the exact Pokémon that needs swapping and takes you straight to it.
- Preview it as a real board, then publish. Published puzzles are frozen — you can take one down, but you cannot edit it, because edits would scramble the records of everyone who already played it.
Every filter you can build a category from
The builder can filter all 1,025 Pokémon along 40 attribute dimensions. Each one becomes a category name that is translated into every language the site speaks — categories you type yourself stay in the language you wrote them in.
Type (18)
The broadest dimension, and the one players reach for first. Sizes range from a handful to well over a hundred.
Also available: .Grass-types (127) · Flying-types (109) · Psychic-types (102) · Bug-types (92) · Poison-types (83) · Fire-types (81) · Ground-types (75) · Rock-types (74) · Fighting-types (73) · Dragon-types (70) · Dark-types (69) · Electric-types (69) · Ghost-types (65) · Steel-types (65) · Fairy-types (64) · Ice-types (48)
Colour (10)
Pokédex body colour. Useful because it cuts across types — a blue group can hold Water, Flying and Steel at once.
Also available: .Green Pokémon (130) · Grey Pokémon (107) · Red Pokémon (97) · White Pokémon (88) · Yellow Pokémon (88) · Purple Pokémon (87) · Pink Pokémon (60) · Black Pokémon (51)
Generation (9)
The games a Pokémon debuted in. Beware: generation overlaps heavily with evolution stage, since early generations are full of unevolved forms.
Also available: .Generation III (135) · Generation IX (120) · Generation IV (107) · Generation II (100) · Generation VIII (96) · Generation VII (88) · Generation VI (72)
Stage (3)
How far along an evolution line a Pokémon sits. The unevolved bucket is by far the largest, which makes it the easiest one to collide with.
Also available: .Fully Evolved Pokémon (121)
Category pairs that collide
A puzzle needs exactly one valid answer. If a Pokémon on your board satisfies two of your four categories, a player who groups it the other way is told they are wrong — and they were not. These 38 pairs share forty or more Pokémon, so putting both in the same puzzle takes care. The builder hides the risky picks for you, but it is worth knowing where the landmines are.
- Blue Pokémon×Unevolved Pokémon83 shared
- Water-types×Blue Pokémon82 shared
- Generation V×Unevolved Pokémon82 shared
- Water-types×Unevolved Pokémon79 shared
- Brown Pokémon×Unevolved Pokémon77 shared
- Grass-types×Green Pokémon73 shared
- Normal-types×Unevolved Pokémon73 shared
- Generation III×Unevolved Pokémon73 shared
- Generation IX×Unevolved Pokémon72 shared
- Generation I×Unevolved Pokémon68 shared
- Generation I×Middle-Stage Pokémon64 shared
- Green Pokémon×Unevolved Pokémon63 shared
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an account to build a puzzle?
No. You can build a complete puzzle without signing in, and your draft is saved on this device as you go. An account is needed only to publish, so that every puzzle in the community has someone behind it.
Can I edit a puzzle after publishing it?
No, and this is deliberate. Player records store which group each guess belonged to; changing a published puzzle would point every past round at different groups and scramble their results. You can take a puzzle down at any time and publish a corrected version as a new one.
What does the trap level mean?
It counts how many Pokémon in the whole Pokédex fit two of your four categories. None of them are on your board — that would be a second answer — but their existence is what makes players hesitate. Zero means the four categories never touch and the board is likely solved in one pass; a very high number means the categories are so entangled that solving starts to feel like guessing.
Can I write my own category names?
Yes — use the search tab and type any name you like. The trade-off is that hand-written categories cannot be checked automatically for a second valid answer, and they are shown exactly as typed rather than translated. Attribute-based categories get both checks and translations for free.
Does building puzzles earn XP?
No. Neither building nor playing community puzzles awards XP, affects streaks, or counts towards the leaderboards. Anything else would let someone build a trivial puzzle and farm it with a second account.