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

It’s a rare moment that I manage to get Purple Group as my very first one, but thanks to when I was born, I think I was at an advantage more than most.

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.

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Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase

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.

  • BITTER
  • SPICE
  • MEAN
  • WINTER
  • HAMMER
  • CONE
  • PLANE
  • JET
  • GOLDEN
  • SAW
  • MIST
  • MUSK
  • GILMORE
  • CHISEL
  • WATER
  • SHOWER

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - CHISEL
  • 🟢 Green Group - MUSK
  • 🔵 Blue Group - CONE
  • 🟣 Purple Group - MEAN

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Building something
  • 🟢 Green Group - Nice and ripe
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Spray it
  • 🟣 Purple Group - ____ [phrase]

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Carpentry Tools
  • 🟢 Green Group - Kinds of Melon
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Garden Hose Settings
  • 🟣 Purple Group - _____ Girls of Pop Culture

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 - Carpentry Tools (CHISEL, HAMMER, PLANE, SAW)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Kinds of Melon (BITTER, MUSK, WATER, WINTER)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Garden Hose Settings (CONE, JET, MIST, SHOWER)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - _____ Girls of Pop Culture (GILMORE, GOLDEN, MEAN, SPICE)

Grouping together the tools Chisel, Hammer and Saw for Yellow Group was fairly easy, but I could not get away from trying to connect Plane and Jet which was a pretty obvious trap, but it still messed up my analysis.

Green Group? I have genuinely never heard of Bitter Melon, Musk Melon or Winter Melon, only Water Melon, so I truly had no idea what was going on here. I kept trying to see if Elon Musk was going to fit into the puzzle somewhere but clearly he did not. Then, Musk like a smell and nope, not that either.

Blue Group depends how much time you spend in the yard or I suppose washing your car. I am not quite sure what you’re supposed to use a Cone setting for compared to the others, and I’m usually on Jet blasting things away or on shower watering plants in a way that doesn’t rip the roots out of the ground.

Purple Group! This was my bag. I grew up watching/listening to all of these girls, Golden Girls (reruns, of course), Gilmore Girls, rocking out to the Spice Girls and then seeing Mean Girls roughly ten times. It’s an all-time classic in my generation. I can’t believe they remade it as a musical version, that was terrible.

Which clues tripped you up today?

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