Hi there! I'm Angel Candysalt and I'm so happy you've stopped by, as I really need your help with a word puzzle game called Connections where you simply group four related words together. I've been struggling with it today, and I'm also quite suspicious about randomElf's score of fifty thousand points - something seems off about that, don't you think?

Silver medal

Elf Connect Easy Hints: I love brain games! This one is like the New York Times Connections game. Your goal here is to find groups of items that share something in common. Think of each group as having a hidden connection or theme—four items belong together, and there are multiple groups to find! See if you can spot patterns or common threads to make connections. Group all the items correctly to win!

For the simple version, we let the AI help us. In this way, we also receive an explanation of how the groups were formed. For further levels I only show the outputs.

I'll give you 16 words. Always find 4 that go together and group them.
Crosby, White Christmas, Star, Blitzen, Lights, Garland, Mittens, Comet, Sleigh, Bag, Prancer, Gifts, Jingle Bells, Tinsel, Belafonte, Vixen

Let me group these 16 words into sets of 4 that are thematically related:
Reindeer Team: Blitzen, Comet, Prancer, Vixen
Christmas Decorations: Lights, Garland, Tinsel, Star
Holiday Songs/Singers: Crosby, White Christmas, Jingle Bells, Belafonte
Santa's Equipment: Sleigh, Bag, Mittens, Gifts

Let me organize these 16 security testing tools into logical groups of 4:
Network Analysis Tools: Nmap, Wireshark, netcat, Nessus
Mobile/Binary Analysis: Frida, apktool, Cycript, AppMon
Web Application Testing: burp, OWASP zap, Nikto, wfuzz
Post-Exploitation/Red Team: Metasploit, Empire, Cobalt Strike, HAVOC

Let me group these 16 cryptographic concepts and algorithms into sets of 4:
Historical/Classical Ciphers: Caesar, Scytale, One-time Pad, Ottendorf
Modern Symmetric Algorithms: AES, Blowfish, 3DES, RSA
Wireless Security Protocols: WPA2, WEP, TKIP, LEAP
General Crypto Concepts: Symmetric, Asymmetric, hash, hybrid

Let me group these 16 networking protocols into logical sets of 4:
Layer 2 (Data Link) Protocols: ARP, Ethernet, PPP, IEEE 802.11
Layer 3 (Network) Protocols: IP, ICMP, IGMP, IPX
Secure Communication Protocols: SSH, SSL, TLS, IPSec
Application Layer Protocols: HTTP, FTP, SMTP, DNS

If you want a more difficult challenge, try beating randomElf's score.

Gold medal

Elf Connect Hard Hints: WOW! A high score of 50,000 points! That’s way beyond the limit! With only four rounds and a max of 400 points per round, the top possible score should be 1,600 points. So, how did someone get to 50,000? Something unusual must be happening! If you're curious, you might want to check under the hood. Try opening the browser's developer tools console and looking around—there might even be a variable named 'score' that could give you some insights. Sometimes, games hold secrets for those who dig a little deeper. Give it a shot and see what you can discover!

The clues here tell us everything. In the Javascript console, we select the frame for the Elf Connect game and simply overwrite the variable score. After one round, the value is accepted and we have beaten the high score.

score = 50000;

Amazing! You really connected all the dots like a pro.