Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Decently tough Connections today, but if you get enough of the easier categories maybe you won’t have to stumble with purple group.
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.
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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.
- PLASTER
- SLING
- HIDE
- BLANKET
- PELT
- SINK
- RED
- COAT
- SKIN
- COVER
- CAST
- INKS
- SIMON
- HURL
- KINS
- CAPTURE
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – COAT
- 🟢 Green Group – HURL
- 🔵 Blue Group – KINS
- 🟣 Purple Group – CAPTURE
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – All-encompassing
- 🟢 Green Group – Go long
- 🔵 Blue Group – Use all those letters
- 🟣 Purple Group – Play time
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow Group – Spread Over
- 🟢Green Group – Throw
- 🔵 Blue Group – Anagrams
- 🟣 Purple Group – First Words of Kids’ Games
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 – Spread Over (BLANKET, COAT, COVER, PLASTER)
- 🟢Green Group – Throw (CAST, HURL, PELT, SLING)
- 🔵 Blue Group – Anagrams (INKS, KINS, SINK, SKIN)
- 🟣 Purple Group – First Words of Kids’ Games (CAPTURE, HIDE, RED, SIMON)
Yellow Group wasn’t bad this time as BLANKET, COAT and COVER all seem like something that well, COVERs, so you just have to put the wall-focused PLASTER on there and then you’re on the way.
Green Group is a little tough, as I only use CAST in the context of casting spells in video games. PELT is also something that immediately made me think of furs, rather than an action, so that tripped me up for a while.
Blue Group is about whether or not you can seperate out the meaning of the word from the structure of the word, which Connections throws in there from time to time. Seeing them all together like this, it feels obvious, but when they’re on the board, not so much.
Purple Group is full of kids games they don’t play any more because everyone is just on iPads. That includes CAPTURE the flag, HIDE and seek, RED rover and SIMON says, of course.
Which of these were difficult for you?
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