Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Welcome to your weekend Connections where you can’t allow your brain to slack off just because work or school isn’t happening. And there are some tough categories today. But first, let’s do a refresher:
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.
- Beans
- Minus
- Love
- Energy
- Zip
- Best
- Comic
- Sans
- Sincerely
- Wanting
- Bacon
- Sunset
- Absent
- Landing
- Cheers
- Pep
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Yellow Group – An email component
- Green Group – A hole not whole
- Blue Group – Ready to start the day
- Purple Ground – Read between (long) lines
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Yellow Group – Letter Sign-off
- Green Group – Without
- Blue Group – Vigor
- Purple Ground – ____ Strip
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 – Letter Sign-off (BEST, CHEERS, LOVE, SINCERELY)
- Green Group – Without (ABSENT, MINUS, SANS, WANTING)
- Blue Group – Vigor (BEANS, ENERGY, PEP, ZIP)
- Purple Ground – ____ Strip (BACON, COMIC, LANDING, SUNSET)
Some interesting tricks in here today. I thought Purple Group was pretty straightforward as I write probably 30 emails a day and I am signing off with one of those most of the time, or receiving one in return. My go-to is BEST. My UK friends say CHEERS, obviously.
The trick for the green group here was putting COMIC and SANS in the same puzzle, making you think it was about fonts or something, but besides that, there’s nothing to indicate that. ZIP could also be in this category and that’s how I wasted one of my attempts.
Blue group is a little weird as PEP and ZIP sounds like terms from the ’50s. I have quite literally never heard BEANS used to describe energy or vigor in my entire life, so that was something that threw me.
Purple group did a common set-up of a blank followed by a word they all share in a phrase. SUNSET strip is of course a literal place while the others are not, but in hindsight, this one should have made sense.
How did you perform today?
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