Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Time to begin the weekend with some Connections, and there is one group today that I think is borderline impossible to get on its own.
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:
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
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.
- TACK
- TAP
- RAP
- SNAP
- LEO
- BRAD
- SPIKE
- DON
- NAIL
- WELL
- MIC
- PASS
- SPRING
- RAIN
- PUNT
- PIN
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Green Group – Hut Hut
- Yellow Group – Thirst quencher
- Blue Group – A hook up
- Purple Group – Cowabunga!
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Green Group – Things you can do with a football
- Yellow Group – Sources of drinking water
- Blue Group – Sharp fasteners
- Purple Group – Starts of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
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:
- Green Group – Things you can do with a football (PASS, PUNT, SNAP, SPIKE)
- Yellow Group – Sources of drinking water (RAIN, SPRING, TAP, WELL)
- Blue Group – Sharp fasteners (BRAD, NAIL, PIN, TACK)
- Purple Group – Starts of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (DON, LEO, MIC, RAP)
Okay there was one easy clue, one sort of hard one, one pretty hard one and one I would consider bordering impossible.
Green group was easy if you watch or play any football at all. I guess some people may forget that “spike” is a football move, but yes, it can be pretty important to strategic play.
Yellow group was doable if you could at least get three of these. I knew that some of these were water sources but I sort of forgot that “tap” was one of them. I mean, tap water, of course, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.
Blue group – I did get nail, pin and tack pretty easily. Brad? I don’t know what a brad is, and I was trying to find some sort of clue related to Brad Pitt. Needless to say, that did not go well. Looking up “brad” I now know what it is, but I literally never knew those things were called that.
Purple group? Oh come on. I have seen roughly 100 Ninja Turtles episodes plus all the movies growing up, and this still would have never occured to me. Don and Leo maybe, but Mic and Rap? When those may go together for a music-based clue? This was impossible.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
