Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
New Connections today and I think that the NYT is going to start to have to be a little less obvious with how they set up Purple Group at this point.
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.
- THERMOSTAT
- PIANO
- PLAY
- FIDDLE
- FLUTE
- FORTE
- MESS
- BELFAST
- STEIN
- LARGO
- TUMBLER
- TINKER
- NESQUICK
- COUPE
- ALLEGRO
Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – FLUTE
- 🟢 Green Group – MESS
- 🔵 Blue Group – FORTE
- 🟣 Purple Group – THERMOSTAT
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡 Yellow Group – Don’t break it
- 🟢 Green Group – Music words without music
- 🔵 Blue Group – Music words that are music words
- 🟣 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 – Glassware
- 🟢 Green Group – Mess Around (With)
- 🔵 Blue Group – Music Performance Directions
- 🟣 Purple Group – Ending in Synonyms for ASAP
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 – Glassware (COUPE, FLUTE, STEIN, TUMBLER)
- 🟢 Green Group – Mess Around (With) – FIDDLE, MESS, PLAY, TINKER
- 🔵 Blue Group – Music Performance Directions – (ALLEGRO, FORTE, LARGO, PIANO)
- 🟣 Purple Group – Ending in Synonyms for ASAP (BASSOON, BELFAST, NESQUICK, THERMOSTAT)
Rather than go through all the groups top to bottom right now, I need to go on a little rant about how the NYT is handling Purple Group on most days, which is supposed to be the hardest group, but they just keep relying on the same tropes over and over again.
Either we have ____ word with a space, word _____ with a space, ____word with no space, or word_____ with no space. You can almost always figure out that it’s going to be something like this, given that there will be words that truly have nothing to do with anything, and that’s very apparent right away. Belfast is of course a city, and has no other meanings, and clearly has nothing to do with anything else on the board, so that’s obviously purple. The same with Nesquick, the chocolate milk mix, so you put even two of those together and look for that format and hey, surprise, it’s something in the second half of the word. Get that and getting the next two is more than easy.
I just think they have to figure out how to do hard categories using this kind of format far less often than they do, because if you eliminate Purple Group as being hard, often the entire puzzle will be too easy. Okay, rant over.
Which one of these tripped you up today?
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