Connection Goals: Let Completion Mean Making a Connection
Technical terms: Connection goal
You can make completion depend on forming a required link between places, edges, objects, words, or ideas. A connection goal may be spatial, like an uninterrupted route across a board, or conceptual, like sorting every word into a related group.
The maker must define what counts as connected. Must parts touch, share a letter, belong to one category, form a continuous path, or merely support a convincing interpretation? The answer is the puzzle.
See it in Hex and Connections
Hex ends when one player links opposite sides of the board. The New York Times’ Connections puzzle ends when all sixteen words have been divided into four intended conceptual groups. One connection is spatial; the other is authored and semantic.
What you can do with it
Make partial progress visible enough to reason about. Offer more than one plausible route when exploration matters, or deliberately narrow the route when the pleasure should come from discovering the author's intended relationship.
Ask a player
Could you tell what kind of connection you were trying to make, and did discovering it feel earned?
Nearby ideas
- Authorial inference — work out which relationship a setter intended.
- Network building — create systems of several connected elements.
- Completing targets — finish discrete objectives.
- Ambiguity — allow more than one plausible interpretation.
Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design (2020), VIC-14, p. 192. ---