Each day’s game of NYT Connections goes live at midnight local time. Before we get to today’s Connections hints and answers, here are Fridays:
If you’re interested in a rather hard Connections puzzle today, I think that this may test the bounds of your knowledge more than usual. But that’s why we have some hints and answers here to help you out.
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.
- LUXE
- TREK
- BOTTLE
- WARS
- COPE
- ANISE
- SARA
- KELLY
- SAGE
- MARCH
- HUNTER
- MACE
- HIKE
- PEA
- DILL
- TRAMP
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Blue Group – From A to B
- Yellow Group – A bit of flavor
- Green Group – A rainbow section
- Purple Group – Half words
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Blue Group – Travel on Foot
- Yellow Group – Herbs and Spices
- Green Group – Shades of Green
- Purple Group – Starts of European Capitals
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:
- Blue Group – Travel on Foot (HIKE, MARCH, TRAMP, TREK)
- Yellow Group – Herbs and Spices (ANISE, DILL, MACE, SAGE)
- Green Group – Shades of Green (BOTTLE, HUNTER, KELLY, PEA)
- Purple Group – Starts of European Capitals (COPE, LUXE, SARA, WARS)
Blue Group was pretty straightforward today, even if it did use one of the “trick” words. That would be the pair of TREK and WARS, as you might imagine they are connected by STAR, but that’s not the case. Usually those tricks have two connected words, but if you get to three, that’s probably the right answer most of the time.
Yellow Group? I do not cook, that is not my think. I know what DILL and SAGE are, but ANISE and MACE are not in my vocabulary in terms of things to use while making food. I’m just not a good cook, so this was a tough section.
Green Group was cleverly shades of green, which was no doubt not an accident. This one was okay, but I didn’t really clock BOTTLE as a shade of green. There are about ten million of these at the paint store, and it’s hard to keep track of them all.
Purple Group loves being difficult, and once again we have a “half word” series of answers, this time about European capitals. There’s Copenhagen, Luxembourg City (trick, as it shares the name with the entire country), Warsaw and Sarajevo, the last of which may be tougher than some.
Pretty hard puzzle today, I’m not going to lie. How did you do before the hints?
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