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

Well, this is one of the easiest Connections I’ve seen in a while, so I’m not sure you’ll even need a guide, but if you do, here we are.

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.

  • POST-IT
  • TREASURY
  • HERALDRY
  • PLAY
  • INTERIOR
  • MUSICAL
  • MENTAL
  • STATE
  • TIMES TABLES
  • EDUCATION
  • OPERA
  • PSYCHIC
  • EXTRASENSORY
  • GLOBETROTTER
  • TELEPATHIC
  • BALLET

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - MENTAL
  • 🟢 Green Group - INTERIOR
  • 🔵 Blue Group - OPERA
  • 🟣 Purple Group - POST-IT

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - All in your head
  • 🟢 Green Group - Take your seat
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Government oversight
  • 🟣 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 - Clairvoyant
  • 🟢 Green Group - Staged Performances
  • 🔵 Blue Group - US Cabinet Departments
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Starting with Newspaper Names

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 - Clairvoyant (EXTRASENSORY, MENTAL, PSYCHIC, TELEPATHIC)
  • 🟢 Green Group - US Cabinet Departments (EDUCATION, INTERIOR, STATE, TREASURY)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Staged Performances (BALLET, MUSICAL, OPERA, PLAY)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - Starting with Newspaper Names (GLOBETROTTER, HERALDRY, POST-IT, TIMES TABLES)

For Yellow Group, there is really no way not to link extrasensory (part of ESP), psychic and telepathic almost immediately. I’m not sure mental is exactly the same type of thing, but it’s in your mind, so I suppose that’s good enough for this group. Mentalist, maybe?

Green Group is in the news a lot as different heads of these departments are in and out or starting or ending wars at any given time. These are not exactly obscure departments, and the only thing that could have made this easier is Homeland Security. They could have done a trick and put in War, since the Department of Defense has been changed to the Department of War in the Trump era.

Blue Group, again, hard not to pair all of these. I mean, only play even has a secondary meaning. I’m not sure why this was a category at all, frankly, much less for Blue Group.

As expected, Purple Group is the hardest, but as per Connections rules, you don’t have to discover it at all if you just do the other three, which today were very easy. Also if you start seeing extremely random worse, you know to look for the little tricks like the start or end all linking together in some sort of theme, which is what happened here.

Did you think this was harder than I did? Let me know.

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