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

Well, today’s Connections has one of the easiest yellow groups I’ve ever seen, but that was offset by tougher blue and purple groups.

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.

  • TURN SIGNAL
  • WEATHER
  • POSTER
  • BUMPER STICKER
  • VANITY PLATE
  • CURSOR
  • SPOILER
  • TROLL
  • SMOKE DETECTOR
  • FUZZY DICE
  • SPAMMER
  • NERD
  • RED
  • EYELIDS
  • HOOD ORNAMENT
  • LURKER

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - FUZZY DICE
  • 🟢 Green Group - LURKER
  • 🔵 Blue Group - CURSOR
  • 🟣 Purple Group - RED

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Maybe touch grass
  • 🟢 Green Group - Customized wheels
  • 🔵 Blue Group - You are doing it now
  • 🟣 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 - Ways to Personalize a Car
  • 🟢 Green Group - People in an Online Forum
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Things that Blink
  • 🟣 Purple Group - ______ Alert

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 - Ways to Personalize a Car (BUMPER STICKER, FUZZY DICE, HOOD ORNAMENT, VANITY PLATE)
  • 🟢 Green Group - People in an Online Forum (TROLL, POSTER, LURKER, SPAMMER)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Things that Blink (CURSOR, EYELIDS, SMOKE DETECTOR, TURN SIGNAL)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - ______ Alert (NERD, RED, SPOILER, WEATHER)

I mean, I cannot remember an easier Yellow Group in quite some time. It was so simple that I thought I was being tricked, but obviously all of those are car things, whether you get the personalize clue or not. You can customize essentially anything on a car, really.

Green Group I am well familiar with given that I grew up in forums, though many people doing this puzzle may not have. Do you know the lingo of Poster and Lurker, for instance? And no one likes a Spammer or Troll. Although admittedly, entire boards can be made of up Trolls.

Blue Group was a lot harder to connect for me. Turn Signal felt like it could be in the car category, and I don’t really think of Smoke Detectors as things that blink, though obviously they do. Cursors do as well so you don’t lose track of them. I thought this was pretty tough, however.

Purple Group? Yeah, this was tough. I can’t remember anyone saying Nerd Alert for 20 years or so, so that’s not exactly a phrase that comes to mind. Spoiler alert I do say in my job quite a bit writing about movies and shows. Weather Alerts are common, certainly.

Which ones tripped you up today?

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