Welcome back, Connectioneers! If you’re looking for help with today’s puzzling NYT Connections puzzle, I’m here to offer my assistance with some extra clues and the solutions to the Yellow, Blue, Green and Purple groups.
It’s the last day of May and soon, very soon, it’ll be June. Today’s Connections is pretty tricky, which just means it’s that much more fun to solve.
Check out my weekend streaming guide for all the best new TV shows and movies out this weekend to stream at home or go see in at the movies.
Today’s Connections is a 2/5 difficulty according to Connections Bot. Let’s solve it!
If you’re looking for Saturday’s Connections guide, it’s right here.
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.
NYT Connections Hints And Answers – Sunday, May 31
Below, we’ll get into some extra hints for each Connections group – Yellow, Blue, Green and Purple – and then the official clues and answers.
Here are today’s Connections words:
- soak
- cue
- school bus
- sash
- rack
- butter
- salt
- spine
- break
- steak
- sea dog
- pikachu
- rubber duck
- tar
- jack
Here’s an Extra Hint for Each Connections Group
- 🟡Yellow group – The color is the clue here.
- 🔵Blue group – Pirates will lead the way.
- 🟢Green group – A game you play in a bar.
- 🟣Purple group – Remove one letter from the start of each word to create four new words.
One Word for Each Connections Group:
- 🟡Yellow group – school bus
- 🔵Blue group – jack
- 🟢Green group – cue
- 🟣Purple group – soak
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow group – Things that are yellow
- 🔵Blue group – Slang for a sailor
- 🟢Green group – Billiards terms
- 🟣Purple group – Kinds of wood plus “S”
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. The Connections answers are:
- 🟡Yellow group – butter, Pikachu, rubber duck, school bus
- 🔵Blue group – jack, salt, sea dog, tar
- 🟢Green group – break, cue, pocket, rack
- 🟣Purple group – sash, soak, spine, steak
Here’s the finished grid:
This was a pretty daunting Connections at first, though it only ranks 3/5 on the Connections Bot difficulty scale. Still, I burned a few guesses before getting this one right. I started by entering all the sort of more outlandish words: Pikachu, Rubber Duck, School Bus and Sea Dog. I was one away, and after a moment’s thought, realized that three of these things were yellow. I scrapped Sea Dog and added Butter (everything is better when you add butter!) and that did the trick.
I’m not very good at billiards, but Cue clued me in and soon I had Racked up all the pool words in my Pocket. Lucky Break!
Blue was next, and I was pretty sure that Sea Dog and Jack went together, and probably Salt, but I admit that I wasn’t sure and Soak and Sash both threw me off a bit. The correct word was Tar, of course, and that left me with the Purple words. Remove their S’s and you get ash, oak, pine and teak. It’s so easy to miss these!
How’d you do on today’s Connections? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Find more guides to Wordle, Pips and Strands on my blog where you can also follow me for TV and movie and video game coverage. Let me know if you have any fun puzzle games in your rotation that I should try on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Have a great Sunday!
