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

I would consider this a very hard Connections today, where I struggled hard with three out of the four groups and got pretty lucky on the other.

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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Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase

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.

  • WALTZ
  • LOAFER
  • SHAM
  • BORE
  • REAM
  • BOULEVARD
  • SHEET
  • BALE
  • THROW
  • BUNDLE
  • JORDAN
  • ROLLS-ROYCE
  • PHOENIX
  • DRILL
  • COMFORTER
  • COUNTERSINK

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - SHAM
  • 🟢 Green Group - BALE
  • 🔵 Blue Group - DRILL
  • 🟣 Purple Group - BUNDLE

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Get cozy
  • 🟢 Green Group - Statue grabbers
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Dig deep
  • 🟣 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 - Bedding
  • 🟢 Green Group - Oscar-Winning Actors Since 2010
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Perform Some Hole Machining Operations
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Starting With Bread Loaf Shapes

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 - Bedding (COMFORTER, SHAME, SHEET, THROW)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Oscar-Winning Actors Since 2010 (BALE, JORDAN, PHOENIX, WALTZ)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Perform Some Hole Machining Operations (BORE, COUNTERSINK, DRILL, REAM)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Starting With Bread Loaf Shapes (BOULEVARD, BUNDLE, LOAFER, ROLLS-ROYCE)

Man, this was a tough puzzle. I got Blue Group first because I just took a wild guess that Countersink had something to do with drilling, given the “sink” in the word, and that did turn out to be correct, though I still don’t even know exactly what that is. “ A conical hole cut into a material or the specialized tool used to cut it, allowing flat-head screws, bolts, or rivets to sit completely flush with or below the surface," it says.

Bedding should be an easy category as Yellow Group but as something of a bro I know what Sheet and Comforter are, but past Pillow, I don’t know what else would be there. I guess Throw is a pillow, which I now realize.

These ones with last names, especially ones that mean other things, are always very hard, as was the case with Green Group today. That would be Christian Bale, Michael B. Jordan, Joaquin Phoenix and Christoph Waltz. That is a 15 year span and also includes Best Supporting Actor so yeah, that’s a huge pool.

Starting with bread shapes? Come on Purple Group, what am I supposed to do with that. I don’t know what a Boule is, so that certainly didn’t stand out. That’s a round loaf of bread, it seems, something I have never bought or eaten, so far as I know.

Tough puzzle! How did you do?

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