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

This was a pretty hard Connections today, but one I completed almost entirely by accident. May you have the same luck as me.

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.

  • BREA
  • KING
  • SNAP
  • PING
  • STILL
  • PAZ
  • SNOW
  • SHOT
  • BOHEME
  • FIDDLER
  • ALERT
  • PRINT
  • CHIME
  • SCALA
  • HERMIT
  • DING

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - DING
  • 🟢 Green Group - SHOT
  • 🔵 Blue Group - KING
  • 🟣 Purple Group - PAZ

The hints for the Connections groups today are:

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Silence it
  • 🟢 Green Group - Shutter related
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Snap snap scoot scoot
  • 🟣 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 - Digital Notifications
  • 🟢 Green Group - Photo
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Kinds of Crabs
  • 🟣 Purple Group - La _____

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:

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

  • 🟡 Yellow Group - Digital Notifications (ALERT, CHIME, DING, PING)
  • 🟢 Green Group - Photo (PRINT, SHOT, SNAP, STILL)
  • 🔵 Blue Group - Kinds of Crabs (FIDDLER, HERMIT, KING, SNOW)
  • 🟣 Purple Group - La _____ (BOHEME, BREA, PAZ, SCALA)

Alright the first two groups I got somewhat easily, including Yellow Group, given that I am plagued by these things all the time. Even if you silence them, they still buzz with notifications anyway. Turn them off entirely and suddenly you’re missing emergency calls or texts.

Green Group had three I got right away, though I’m not really sure about Still. Is that what you call a photo in a way that isn’t just calling it a photo? I also think of Still Life, but maybe it’s just a photography term I haven’t heard all that much.

Blue Group is where things got funny. I had zero idea that we were looking for crabs here. Rather, I thought we were talking about things “on roofs,” which included Fiddlers and Snow. While I don’t know any Kings or Hermits on roofs (I guess they can live high up?) I picked them randomly and got the category.

For Purple Group, while I knew La Brea, I had no idea that La connected with any of these others, despite understanding what the category was supposed to be. They are:

  • La Brea - Tar pits in California that sucked down things like sabretooth tigers millions of years ago
  • La Boheme - A famous opera
  • La Paz - An extremely high up city in Bolivia
  • La Scala - A historic opera house in Milan, Italy

Which of these gave you trouble today?

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