Connections is released at midnight in your local time zone. Newsweek will be back with another round of hints and tips for each new game.

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That mishap led to several hours of traffic tie-ups between Manhattan and Queens, as the MTA temporarily closed the tunnel and sealed off the leak. A photo shows a portion of the temporary solution put in place.

The Times' puzzle editor Wyna Liu said that the categories' difficulty varies daily. "Some categories might be defined by their use of wordplay—palindromes, homophones, adding or dropping letters and words—rather than the literal meanings of the words on the cards. I identified three areas where difficulty could be adjusted: the familiarity of the words, the ambiguity of their categorization, and the variety of the wordplay," she said.

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Below are some helpful tips to maintain your Connections winning streak—but proceed with caution if you prefer to solve the answers by yourself.

As for how the leak could have happened in the first place? Cathy Sheridan, the president of bridges and tunnels at the MTA, said simply "There are many redundancies in the tunnel. But when someone drills through all those layers — it’s going to cause a leak."

Aliss Higham is a Newsweek reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her focus is reporting on issues across the U.S., including state benefits, national and local politics, and crime. She has previously extensively covered U.S. and European politics, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the British Royal Family. Aliss joined Newsweek full time in January 2024 after a year of freelance reporting and has previously worked at digital Reach titles The Express and The Mirror. She is a graduate in English and Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. You can get in touch with Aliss by emailing a.higham@newsweek.com. Languages: English.

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There is good news: The MTA, which operates the 84-year-old tunnel, said repairs were completed Friday night. And there has been little impact on drivers using the tunnel since Wednesday.

The categories are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep the player on their toes. For instance, a past green category was anagrams, with the answers being pastel, petals, pleats, staple. Another example from the purple category is informal fried appetizers: ring, stick, tender, wing.

Repairs have begun on the tunnel two days after a contractor working for the New York City Economic Development Corporation mistakenly drilled a small hole in the outer casing of the tunnel while doing preliminary work for the East River Esplanade just after noon on Wednesday.

New video shows water gushing into the Queens-Midtown Tunnel earlier in the week after a hole was mistakenly drilled into it by a subcontractor, and now there is a better sense of what led up to the incident that halted snarled commutes for hours.

The specific color of each category is only revealed after solving it. Players can shuffle the board to possibly simplify the guessing process.

That distance might have proven significant, since the tunnel crosses the East River north of where cars enter on East 36th Street — and very close to the barge. Investigators said the contractor drilled 50 feet down into the East River, then another 50 feet through the soil. That's when the drill cracked the cast-iron liner above the tunnel's exhaust duct.

The free-to-play brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. Players need to discern the common theme for each category: yellow, green, blue, and purple.

The city had been conducting what they have called geotechnical work, essentially geared toward finding out how best to support a waterfront park. That would become the final missing piece of a 32-mile greenway around Manhattan.

Players can be somewhat misled by words that might fit multiple categories, adding to the challenge. Each group, however, must contain four distinct words with no repeats. The difficulty escalates with color, starting with yellow as the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple being the toughest to crack.

Video posted to social media — and confirmed by multiple agencies to be accurate — shows water forcefully shooting through the hole and pouring into the tunnel.

Aliss Higham is a Newsweek reporter based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her focus is reporting on issues across the U.S., including ... Read more

From that 2.5-inch hole on the outside edge of the tunnel, water was able to get into the south tube via the ventilation ducts, a spokesperson for NYC EDC said, and leak onto cars passing through.

Did you guess the answers correctly? If so, congratulations! If not, there will be another opportunity to crack the puzzle tomorrow.

City officials declined to speak with NBC New York on camera to delve into what went wrong. However, sources said to News 4 that the contractor, New Jersey-based drilling specialist Warren George, told investigators that their barge had drifted 50 feet from where they had initially planned to drill.