Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Let’s classify this as a medium difficulty Connections this fine Saturday, one that is too clever for its own good, I would argue.
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.
- ALLEY
- SPORT
- TACKLE
- LANE
- TOM
- COURT
- KIT
- BOB
- DON
- BILL
- WEAR
- GEAR
- PAT
- WAY
- PUT ON
- STUFF
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Green Group – Looking fly
- Blue Group – GPS terms
- Yellow Group – Bring the things
- Purple Group – Call me by my name
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Green Group – Dress In
- Blue Group – Street Suffixes
- Yellow Group – Equipment
- Purple Group – Nicknames that Have Other Meanings
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:
- Green Group – Dress In (DON, PUT ON, SPORT, WEAR)
- Blue Group – Street Suffixes (ALLEY, COURT, LANE, WAY)
- Yellow Group – Equipment (GEAR, KIT, STUFF, TACKLE)
- Purple Group – Nicknames that Have Other Meanings (BILL, BOB, PAT, TOM)
Green Group commits the rare sin of using two words when almost always we just see one. I suppose SPORT and TACKLE were ones that were supposed to go together, maybe LANE for bowling as well and COURT for basketball. But if you picked that as a group you would have missed entirely.
Blue Group wasn’t that bad but ALLEY is a relatively rare suffix when you’re going places. I guess “street” would have been a little too easy on its own, as that’s the most common one. Nothing about freeways in there either.
Yellow Group is pretty generalized, but mainly referencing sports and I guess fishing? A TACKLE box? That’s the only way I know that word. “STUFF” is a bit general compared to the rest of it. I only got that last one by default, and it wasn’t even Purple Group.
Purple Group was so easy! I know the puzzle thinks it’s clever by making those name have other meanings, but all your had to do was find any name and put them together where the category could have just been “names.” Interestingly, we have a fifth clue that would have qualified without question, as DON is in that group as its alternate meaning is right there in a different group. Kind of strange, and you do not see that often.\
How did you far today?