Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Very, very tough puzzle today, but my lack of culture certainly did not help me out. I need to learn more about the rest of the globe, clearly.
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. 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.
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You pick the four words you think are linked, and you may 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.
- STEAK
- LEONE
- PRIMO
- MALL
- MADRE
- MIST
- POKER
- CHOKE
- CLUB
- RAND
- TEAR
- NAIRA
- HIJO
- KWANZA
- WELL
- ABUELA
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – MADRE
- 🟢 Green Group – MIST
- 🔵 Blue Group – RAND
- 🟣 Purple Group – MALL
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – All in the family
- 🟢 Green Group – I’ve got something in my eye
- 🔵 Blue Group – Cash on a continent
- 🟣 Purple Group – [Word] ______
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Spanish Relatives
- 🟢 Green Group – Start To Cry With “Up”
- 🔵 Blue Group – African Currencies
- 🟣 Purple Group – 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 – Spanish Relatives (ABUELA, HIJO, MADRE, PRIMO)
- 🟢 Green Group – Start To Cry With “Up” (CHOKE, MIST, TEAR, WELL)
- 🔵 Blue Group – African Currencies (KWANZA, LEONE, NAIRA, RAND)
- 🟣 Purple Group – Strip _____ (CLUB, MALL, POKER, STEAK)
I had trouble with pretty much every category today. Yellow Group was no exception because I do not speak Spanish, so the only ones I knew offhand were Abuela and Madre, so the others did not fall in line for me unfortunately. I know, I know.
Green Group may have been the “easy” category of the group, but I had a hard time placing Well in that group, and I was not really getting the juxtaposition of Up with the rest of those. Still pretty trick if you ask me.
Blue Group I just…don’t know those currencies. I know Kwanza as a holiday and I know Sierra Leone as a country, but I did not know those were currencies, nor the other two. Difficult section for me here.
Purple Group was a little easier, and only two of these have to do with people taking clothes off, which you may have been able to link first before the others. Can’t say I’m a big fan of strip steak, however. And strip malls these days tend to be pretty depressing.
What ones did you struggle with today?
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