Find the links between the words to win today's game of Connections

This article provides hints and answers for today's NYT Connections game. The goal of the game is to arrange 16 words into four groups of four by figuring out the links between them. The groups could be things like items you can click, names for research study participants or words preceded by a body part.

There’s only one solution for each puzzle, and you’ll need to be careful when it comes to words that might fit into more than one category. You can shuffle the words to perhaps help you see links between them.

Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to figure out, blue and green fall in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult one. The purple group often involves wordplay.

Select four words you think go together and press Submit. If you make a guess and you’re incorrect, you’ll lose a life. If you’re close to having a correct group, you might see a message telling you that you’re one word away from getting it right, but you’ll still need to figure out which one to swap.

If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with the help of some hints, and, if you’re really struggling, today’s Connections answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, it’s easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.

If you have an NYT All Access or Games subscription, you can access the publication’s Connections archive. This includes every previous game of Connections, so you can go back and play any of those that you have missed.

Aside from the first 60 games or so, you should be able to find my hints for each grid via Google if you need them! Just click here and add the date of the game for which you need clues or the answers to the search query.

What Are Today’s Connections Hints?

Scroll slowly! Just after the hints for each of today’s Connections groups, I’ll reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you which words go into them.

Today’s 16 words are...

And the hints for today’s Connections groups are:

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Need some extra help?

Be warned: we’re starting to get into spoiler territory.

Today’s Connections groups are...

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Connections answers.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections answers are...

I cannot believe I didn’t get this one. My streak is over after seven wins. Here’s how I fared:

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I tried to work backwards here after clocking what I thought were the blues (classic video games), falsehoods (yellows) and to trying to date someone (greens). But I had a near miss with the leftovers, what I assumed would be a purple group of COMETS, COIN TOSS, DEFENDER and DRESS COAT. I was one away from a group there, and DEFENDER could have gone with the video games, so I took a bit of a gamble that didn’t quite pay off. Nuts.

With my dream of the reverse rainbow dead, I quickly knocked off the greens and yellows. I suppose COMETS, ASTEROIDS and SONIC THE HEDGEHOG could have formed a group of things that travel very fast. But no, there was definitely a group of games here.

I made a horrible mistake by not trying to figure out the connection between COMETS, COIN TOSS and DRESS COAT to find the final word/phrase for the purples. Instead, I tried to brute force my way there with multiple guesses of the blues that kept SONIC THE HEDGEHOG in every time. I was sure that had to be one of the blues but nope! I failed to remember that Tails (a cute little fox with two tails that can be used for propulsion) is Sonic’s sidekick.

I’m both amused and very mad at myself about this one!! I often played Sonic 2 with my cousin when we were kids and I always enjoyed playing as Tails to back her up (maybe that explains why I prefer to play as a support in Overwatch 2 these days). So I knew that. I also knew that the blues were all Atari games.

I suspect this game is going to ruin a lot of streaks. But maybe we can get it back on a technicality as Tails did not appear in Sonic The Hedgehog, the original game in the series — he debuted in Sonic 2.

Side note: it took me until an embarrassingly late age to realize that Tails’ real name, Miles