Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Extremely difficult, very trick Strands puzzle today with more misleading words than not. I really struggled with this one and I wonder if maybe you did too.
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.
- DUCK
- WING
- ROCKET
- STAR
- LARK
- DIP
- DODGE
- SENATOR
- RAM
- DIVE
- DRY
- FORD
- CHIP
- SCRAPER
- LINCOLN
- FLYER
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Yellow Group – Start your engines
- Green Group – Bring your appetite
- Blue Group – Sticks on ice
- Purple Group – Way up high
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Yellow Group – Car Brands
- Green Group – Bit of Sports Bar Fare
- Blue Group – NHL Team Member
- Purple Group – SKY_____
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 – Car Brands (DODGE, FORD, LINCOLN, RAM)
- Green Group – Bit of Sports Bar Fare (CHIP, DIP, FRY, WING)
- Blue Group – NHL Team Member (DUCK, FLYER, SENATOR, STAR)
- Purple Group – SKY _____ (DIVE, LARK, ROCKET, SCRAPER)
I’’ll be honest, this puzzle threw me for a loop. So many misleading clues. First off, I thought of DIP, DUCK and DODGE as a Dodgeball reference, but it was missing weave, and those weren’t connected at all. Yellow Group had DODGE and the only thing a bit tricky here is that you may not know that RAM was eventually spun off into its own truck-based brand, rather than being attached to DODGE itself.
Green Group is hyper-specific, things you would eat a sports bar, including the pairing of a CHIP and DIP. These are staples of the restaurant but there were a few of the misleading clues in there like DUCK not connection with WING after all. Or FLYER, for that matter.
FLYER and DUCK, however, are together in the Green Group which requires both NHL knowledge and the realization that you’d have to take the S off the back in order to get this right. I think Connections does this because it would be a bit obvious if they all ended in S, so this makes it a lot harder.
Purple Group? Usually when you have a word then a space, those two aren’t connected, but they are here are SKYDIVE, SKYLARK, SKYROCKET and SKYSCRAPER are all words that are connected with Sky, not simply a separate one like we see most of the time. As such, I think this was harder than usual.
What tripped you up here today?
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