Connections hints and answers are here.
Looking for Saturday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
Welcome back to the NYT Connections Weekend Edition, dearest Connectioneers. I’m your Sunday host, Erik Kain, and I’d like to wish all you mothers out there a very happy Mother’s Day. That goes doubly for my own mother. Happy Mother’s Day, mom, if you’re reading this. Even if you’re not reading this.
In any case, it’s a day for mothers and I’m sure that means that most of you are quite busy getting ready for brunch or afternoon tea or something of that nature, so I’ll keep this introduction brief. I’ll leave you with a poem before we get to the day’s Connections. This is “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath, one of my very favorite poets of all time.
Morning Song
Alright, let’s solve this Connections.
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
How To Play Connections
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.
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.
Today’s Connections
Today’s Bonus Clue: There is a Mother’s Day theme here, in purple.
Hints for the Connections groups today are:
- 🟡Yellow group – Think of how you might describe filling someone with delight.
- 🔵Blue group – If you’re on a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X you might encounter these terms.
- 🟢Green group – Get out of the way!
- 🟣Purple group – You’ll need to insert a word before all of these.
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- 🟡Yellow group – Make Happy
- 🔵Blue group– Common Video Game Features
- 🟢Green group – Evade
- 🟣Purple group – Mother ______
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– Delight, Please, Suit, Tickle
- 🔵Blue group – Boss, Health, Level, Power-Up
- 🟢Green group – Dodge, Duck, Shake, Skirt
- 🟣Purple group – Earth, Goose, May I, Superior
Today’s Connections
I got the green words first today. These were pretty obviously all about evading. Dodging out of the way, ducking for cover, shaking your opponent, skirting danger. I screwed up once on the yellows, however, because suit threw me off. While delight and tickle and please all indicate one affecting someone pleasantly, suit feels a bit more pedestrian. “That suits you,” one might say, but it’s not the same as tickle.
The blues were also fairly obvious thanks to the term “power-up” which is so very, very video game. You also level up in a game, or beat levels, and you have health which is often depleted in a boss fight at the end of a level. It helps to have power-ups in order to defeat the boss by separating him from his health.
Which left purple, as is so often the case. I didn’t see the connection here until it was staring me in the face. Mother Goose, Mother Earth, Mother May I?, Mother Superior.
Today’s Connections Bot
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