Saturday, July 4 Clues And Answers

How to Play Connections

Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here.

The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there.

There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can’t just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together.

You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you’re close, it will tell you that you’re one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles. So, onto the hints and answers:

What Are Today’s Connections Hints?

These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers.

• LINGER
• SPOT
• EPIC
• DREAMS
• ZOMBIE
• ODE
• PEA
• SCORPION
• LAST
• HURRICANE
• NOTHINGS
• STAY
• BALLAD
• CONTINUE
• PAINKILLER
• VILLANELLE

Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:

• 🟡 Yellow Group – LAST
• 🟢 Green Group – EPIC
• 🔵 Blue Group – SCORPION
• 🟣 Purple Group – DREAMS

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

• 🟡 Yellow Group – Keep going
• 🟢 Green Group – Not necessarily rhyming
• 🔵 Blue Group – A treat on the beach
• 🟣 Purple Group – [Word]_____

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:

• 🟡 Yellow Group – Persist
• 🟢 Green Group – Kinds of Poems
• 🔵 Blue Group – Tropical Drinks
• 🟣 Purple Group – Sweet ____

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are:

• 🟡 Yellow Group – Persist (CONTINUE, LAST, LINGER, STAY)
• 🟢 Green Group – Kinds of Poems (BALLAD, EPIC, ODE, VILLANELLE)
• 🔵 Blue Group – Tropical Drinks (HURRICANE, PAINKILLER, SCORPION, ZOMBIE)
• 🟣 Purple Group – Sweet ____ (DREAMS, NOTHINGS, PEA, SPOT)

Not the hardest puzzle today. Green Group wasn’t too bad as it was easy to line up ballad, epic and ode. Villanelle, however, I have only heard through the show Killing Eve. So I guess her name had more meaning than I thought it did. Pretty neat.

Purple Group was a typical word-then-blank group, which I have long gotten used to at this point. Usually they are harder than this one, and pea was the last one I got in that list, but I still got it, and I got Purple Group second, which is not normally the case.

For Blue Group, I actually thought I was working toward some sort of rock-and-roll based group, but those “badass” words are actually all tropical drinks you can get on vacation. I suppose I only get Pina Coladas so none of those are really in my wheelhouse. I don’t even know what a scorpion or zombie is, but now I kind of want to find out.

Finally, Yellow Group. Not hard, but I got it last anyway for some reason. They’re not all exactly the same type of word, but they all connect to the central group, so it’s not hard to see why they’re together. All in all, I don’t think this was one of the worst ones I’ve seen.

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