MHA Connections is a daily grouping puzzle in the style of the New York Times game, built entirely from My Hero Academia characters. Sixteen portraits sit on the board and they hide four groups of four. Your job is to work out what links each quartet before you run out of lives.

The links go deeper than simple factions. One group might be a family, another a set of characters whose quirks do the same kind of job, another the key players of a particular arc or the people who shaped the story from behind the scenes. Everyone gets the same board each day, which keeps the leaderboard fair and makes it a good puzzle to compare with friends who follow the series.

Tap a portrait to select it and tap it again to deselect. When exactly four are selected, press Submit. If all four belong to the same hidden group, they lock into a coloured row together with the group's name and a short description of what connects them.

A wrong submission costs one of your five lives, and the puzzle ends when all five are gone. Press Shuffle at any time to rearrange the remaining tiles, which helps when your eye keeps pairing characters just because they happen to sit next to each other.

You also have two hints. A hint reveals the name and description of one unsolved group without placing any tiles, so you still have to find its four members. MHA Connections is one play per day, and signed-in players are ranked on the daily leaderboard by the lives they kept and the time they took.

Start with the most specific tile, not the most famous one. Deku could plausibly be a student, a successor, a rival and a war hero all at once, so he is rarely the best place to begin. Look for a character who fits only one idea on this board and build that group outwards.

Think beyond affiliation. Boards mix families, mentors and students, what a quirk does rather than who has it, arcs, films and the Vigilantes spin-off. If four characters share a faction a little too neatly, suspect a red herring and check whether one of them fits a narrower group better.

Save hints for the middle of the puzzle. Solving the first group yourself often makes the rest clearer, and a hint is worth far more when eight or twelve tiles remain than when the board is still full. Once three groups are solved, the last four tiles complete themselves, so every life you keep before that point is a safety net.