Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
A fun Connections today that I don’t think is all that hard, but by the end it made me a little hungry. Off to grap something unhealthy really quick.
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.
- FORTUNE
- STAR
- DARN
- RAINBOW
- RATS
- BLOW
- SUGAR
- PATCH
- BLAST
- STITCH
- ARTS
- GALE
- MEND
- OATMEAL
- GUST
- TSAR
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Blue Group – Mix it up
- Green Group – A blustery day
- Yellow Group – What’s old can be new
- Purple Group – Bakery bounty
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Blue Group – Anagrams
- Green Group – Rush of Wind
- Yellow Group – Fix a Hole in Clothing
- Purple Group – Kinds of Cookies
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:
- Blue Group – Anagrams (ARTS, RATS, STAR, TSAR)
- Green Group – Rush of Wind (BLAST, BLOW, GALE, GUST)
- Yellow Group – Fix a Hole in Clothing (DARN, MEND, PATCH, STITCH)
- Purple Group – Kinds of Cookies (FORTUNE, OATMEAL, RAINBOW, SUGAR)
Blue Group today caught my eye immediately as I saw STAR and RATS and saw that they were inverses of each other. I thought that may be the answer so I looked around for other words that were spelled backward and forwards to round out that category, but instead I found TSAR and ARTS which is those same letters mixed up.
Green Group was not that difficult though I suppose you may not say a BLAST of wind that often. A Gale is more often used to describe an overall storm rather than a specific rush, but I understand why it would be in that category. Like most of these today I don’t think there are that many “tricks” to try to get you to group things wrong.
For Yellow Group, MEND, PATCH and STITCH go together pretty easily. I don’t precisely know what DARN is but I know it has something to do with yarn so maybe it’s fixing a sweater or something. But I figured it should be in this group all the same, and it turns out I was right.
Purple Group I got by default at the end, which is hardly an unusual circumstance. I don’t know what a RAINBOW cookie is other than I assume one that has a lot of colors in it, but the others are obviously very well-known types of cookies. OATMEAL is my favorite out of those, but I like making SUGAR cookies for the holidays of course.
I did this one pretty fast today, curious to hear what you made of it.
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