Looking for Saturday’s Connections hints and answers instead? You can find them here:
Hello! I hope you’re having a marvelous weekend.
Regular readers may know that I picked up a PlayStation VR2 in a Black Friday sale but was having difficulty getting it up and running. However, thanks to a helpful person on Reddit, I finally got it working and was able to play one of the most ridiculous games of the year.
I’m working on a writeup of that, which I’ll share here in the coming days. But there was one other complication: I wasn’t quite careful enough when taking off the headset the last time I used it. I yanked my glasses from my head, they fell to the floor and… one of the legs snapped off. Oops.
I superglued the leg back on and it’s holding for now. I was overdue for a eye test anyway and I have one booked for tomorrow. Plus, my new health insurance plan kicked in today and that’ll cover much of the cost, so it’s not all bad news.
Anyway! Today’s NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, December 1, are coming right up.
How To Play Connections
Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. You get a new puzzle at midnight every day. You can play on the NYT website or Games app.
You’re presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to arrange them into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like items you can click, names for research study participants or words preceded by a body part.
There’s only one solution for each puzzle, and you’ll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.
Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.
Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you’re incorrect, you’ll lose a life. If you’re close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you’re one word away from getting it right, but you’ll still need to figure out which one to swap.
If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with the help of some hints, and, if you’re really struggling, today’s Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it’s easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.
If you have an NYT All Access or Games subscription, you can access the publication’s Connections archive. This includes every previous game of Connections, so you can go back and play any of those that you have missed.
Aside from the first 60 games or so, you should be able to find my hints for each grid via Google if you need them! Just click here and add the date of the game for which you need clues or the answers to the search query.
What Are Today’s Connections Hints?
Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today’s Connections groups, I’ll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.
Today’s 16 words are…
- SOLO
- JERSEY
- WILLY
- WONKA
- YORK
- HAVEN
- KINDER
- BIRD
- PADS
- CHARMS
- PORT
- HELMET
- RETREAT
- FALLIN’
- CLEATS
- SHELTER
And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:
- Yellow group — safe space
- Green group — gridiron essentials
- Blue group — sweet treats
- Purple group — liberty for all
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Need some extra help?
Be warned: we’re starting to get into spoiler territory.
Today’s Connections groups are…
- Yellow group — sanctuary
- Green group — football gear
- Blue group — candy names
- Purple group — “Free ____”
What Are Today’s Connections Answers?
Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Connections answers.
This is your final warning!
Today’s Connections answers are…
- Yellow group — sanctuary (HAVEN, PORT, RETREAT, SHELTER)
- Green group — football gear (CLEATS, HELMET, JERSEY, PADS)
- Blue group — candy names (CHARMS, KINDER, WONKA, YORK)
- Purple group — “Free ____” (BIRD, FALLIN’, SOLO, WILLY)
I got a perfect game today to go four in a row. Can’t complain too much about that. Here’s how I fared:
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟦🟦🟦🟦
🟨🟨🟨🟨
Not quite the “true perfect” game I should have had yesterday, but not far away either!
I clocked the purples as soon as I saw the top line of the grid. SOLO and WILLY just had to be connected by “free.” I loved Free Willy as a kid and I’ve been meaning to watch the documentary Free Solo for years. I’ll get to the other two words in a moment.
Getting that group made it pretty clear to me that YORK, JERSEY, HAVEN and PORT formed a red herring of “new” city and state terms (New York, New Haven, etc). I highly doubted that there would be two groups that had the same format in one game.
That realization helped me crystalize the greens around CLEATS and JERSEY. I deduced the yellows easily enough, but I submitted the blues first. I can’t say I’m familiar with CHARMS or YORK as candy, but it turned out not to be an issue for me anyway.
That’s all there is to it for today’s Connections clues and answers. Be sure to check my blog for hints and the solution for Monday’s game if you need them.
P.S. I feel compelled to go with a Tom Petty song since “Free Fallin'” was among the purples, though I suppose I could have gone with Lynyrd Skynyrd as “Free Bird” was there too. That said, I much prefer the positive, defiant nature of “I Won’t Back Down” to “Free Fallin’.”
I can relate to the story behind this terrific song. Petty wrote it after an arsonist burned down his house while he was inside. He and his family escaped unscathed, thankfully. I’ve endured a house fire too, when a bathroom heater set my apartment ablaze several years ago. My partner at the time and I were similarly unharmed and we were able to save many of our things, but it was a scary, humbling experience:
I need to recommend the Johnny Cash version of the song as well. What an incredibly rich voice that man had. Oddly enough (according to some quick research on Wikipedia), two of Cash’s former properties in Hendersonville, Tennessee, separately burned down while their new owners were renovating. The more you know.
Have a great day!
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