Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:

Not going to lie, I found today’s Connections to be pretty tough with a lot of linked-together answers that were not in fact linked at all.

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.

  • PUFF
  • EPISODE
  • TIE
  • SHOELACES
  • PERIOD
  • CHAIN
  • SEASON
  • THINK
  • LANYARD
  • FRIENDSHIP BRACELET
  • CONVERSATION
  • SERIES
  • QUIPU
  • BOA
  • FRANCHISE
  • MACRAME

Here is a hint that gives you one word per group:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - SEASON
  • 🟢 Green Group - CHAIN
  • 🔵 Blue Group - MACRAME
  • 🟣 Purple Group - PERIOD

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Turn it on and unwind
  • 🟢 Green Group - A loop around you
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Boy scouts are good at it
  • 🟣 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 - Units of TV Programs
  • 🟢 Green Group - Things Worn Around the Neck
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Strings Tied in Knots
  • 🟣 Purple Group - ____ Piece

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 - Units of TV Programs (EPISODE, FRANCHISE, SEASON, SERIES)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Things Worn Around the Neck (BOA, CHAIN, LANYARD, TIE)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Strings Tied in Knots (FRIENDSHIP BRACELET, MACRAME, QUIPU, SHOELACES)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - ____ Piece (CONVERSATION, PERIOD, PUFF, THINK)

Well, this certainly tripped me up. Like, all of these categories, really. Even as someone who watches a ton of TV, I didn’t really get the TV program group until a few clues in. And still, Yellow Group was probably the easiest out of all of these.

Green Group required you to have at least some mild knowledge of fashion to know what a boa is, hardly used in everyday looks, and not thinking it’s snake. You needed to also realize that Chain and Lanyard were not going to be verbs in this puzzle. Decently tough here.

Alright, now we’re just getting silly with Blue Group. I thought Friendship Bracelets would be a “wrap around the body” clue, but that had to be your neck only, it turns out. I have zero idea what Quipu is. None. I had to look it up and it’s “an ancient Andean recording device made of knotted, colored strings.” Oh yeah man, how could I miss that?

Finally, Purple Group is probably something that New York Times readers are more likely to get compared to most people, as these are all different types of pieces found in the paper. Yes, puff pieces too, as much as they won’t want to admit that. But yeah, harder for the average player, perhaps.

So, which of this gave you a hard time today?

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