Image

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

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 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.

Image

Image

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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