Saturday, December 6 Clues And Answers (#909)

Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:

Today we have a pair of easy groups followed by a pair of very hard ones, so hopefully you don’t blow through your guesses too early.

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.

Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes

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.

MODERATE
MONITORSHIP
AVERAGE
CAR
NEWTON
INCREDIBLE
MEAN
TEMPER
STANDARD
TOADY
COOL
MINION
SETTLE
ADDERALL
MONSTER
PAR

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

🟡 Yellow Group – NORM
🟢 Green Group – COOL
🔵 Blue Group – MINION
🟣 Purple Group – MONITORSHIP

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

🟡 Yellow Group – Just okay
🟢 Green Group – Chill out
🔵 Blue Group – The kids love them
🟣 Purple Group – Only look at the first 4-6 letters

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

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

🟡Yellow Group – Norm
🟢Green Group – Mollify
🔵 Blue Group – Member of a Titular Group in an Animation Franchise
🟣 Purple Group – Starting with Herpetofauna

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 – Norm (AVERAGE, MEAN, PAR, STANDARD
🟢Green Group – Mollify (COOL, MODERATE, SETTLE, TEMPER)
🔵 Blue Group – Member of a Titular Group in an Animation Franchise (CAR, INCREDIBLE, MINION, MONSTER)
🟣 Purple Group – Starting with Herpetofauna (ADDERALL, MONITORSHIP, NEWTON, TOADY)

Yellow Group came easily because once you get Average and Mean in there, you understand where things are heading, and Par and Standard are not too far off. Not all that many that could be in fake-out groups elsewhere.

Similarly, Green Group’s chill words were all pretty well connected, though I suppose most of them have double meanings that could do with temperature (Cool or Temper being how you forge metal, for instance).

Blue Group? Not just animated characters, but animated characters that are single members of the title’s group of characters, as in: Cars, The Incredibles, Minions and Monsters Inc. I though Minion and Toady went together, and maybe Monster was in there too, but nope.

Purple Group will no doubt make you look up “herpetofauna” which are amphibians and reptiles. You need to carve off the first chunk of the word to find Adder, Monitor, Newt and Toad. So simple, thanks NYT!

How did you do today?

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