Connections pulled a classic game design trick this week: showing the player a challenge they haven't seen before, but have unknowingly been preparing for this whole time.

The popular New York Times puzzle game, in which players usually are tasked with grouping a bunch of random words together into hidden categories, threw a heck of a curveball on Wednesday, May 6 . If you haven't checked it out yet, today's puzzle is a bit strange in that it doesn't include words at all.

Instead, it's a bunch of symbols of mundane objects.

Uh...what? Credit: Screenshot: The New York Times

The puzzle actually makes some sense if you do what I did and just look up the answers, but for everyday Connections players, it's obviously going to be a more stiff challenge than usual. Of course, people on the internet had some real thoughts about this.…