My first instinct when I saw ‘New York City’ and ‘Beehives’ was that the connector was a geographical or structural category. I was convinced the answer was something like ‘Things with boroughs’ since NYC has them and beehives have brood chambers, which are a type of compartment. It felt like a solid start. Then ‘Playing cards’ appeared. I thought, ‘Okay, a deck has suits, so that fits the idea of sub-divisions.’ I was still leaning into my initial theory.
But then ‘Chess sets’ came up, and the theory completely fell apart. Chess has pieces, not compartments. My brain stuttered. I tried to force it, thinking maybe it was about ‘Things with distinct groups,’ but it felt incredibly loose. That’s when I stopped thinking about abstract categories and actually looked at the words. *New York City… Queen… Beehives… Queen Bee… Playing cards… Queen of Hearts…* It all clicked at once. I hadn’t even considered a simple word-in-common pattern because the first two clues felt so grand.