As the week draws to a close, don’t be too hard on yourself if you need help to keep your Connections winning streak going—or start a new one if you recently ran out of luck.
The brainteaser was launched by The New York Times in June of last year and has quickly gone on to become the newspaper’s second-most-played game behind Wordle, another word-based puzzle.
If you’ve never played before, Connections challenges players to uncover threads connecting a series of words. Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and the answers for today’s puzzle are toward the end of the article.
How to Play ‘Connections’
Connections tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, Thursday’s game linked the words “Backflip,” “Bellyflop,” “Cannonball” and “Jackknife” in the category “Splashy ways to enter a pool.”
Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and purple. However, the puzzles are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep players challenged.
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The familiarity of the words used, and how often they pop up in modern life, are also difficulty factors, although less-common words aren’t used only in the harder categories. “Item overlap,” where one word can be linked to multiple categories, is another way Connections tests players.
Players can shuffle and rearrange the board if they want to try to make the process of guessing the connections easier. But be careful, players can only make four mistakes in total before the game ends.
NYT puzzle editor Wyna Liu previously said that the categories’ difficulty varies with each daily edition.
“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.
The answers for today’s Connections puzzle will be revealed at the end of this article, so scroll with caution if you want to work them out yourself.
‘Connections’ #425 Clues for Friday, August 9
Newsweek has some hints to help you figure out today’s Connections categories.
Yellow: Words used when someone or something isn’t there.
Green: When someone is in favor of something.
Blue: These are all different styles of music, although relatively similar.
Purple: Words that can be preceded by a word that means surprise.
‘Connections’ #425 Answers for Friday, August 9
Yellow Category: NOT PRESENT
Yellow Words: Absent, Elsewhere, Gone, MIA
Green Category: SUPPORTER
Green Words: Advocate, Champion, Cheerleader, Exponent
Blue Category: ROCK GENRES
Blue Words: Glam, Goth, Metal, Punk
Purple Category: SHOCK _____
Purple Words: Horror, Jock, Value, Wave
Did you guess the answers correctly? If so, congratulations. If you didn’t, there is no need to worry, as there will be another opportunity to crack Connections tomorrow.
Connections is released at midnight in your local time zone, and will be back tomorrow with another round of hints and tips.
If you can’t wait, why not try these other popular online word puzzle games?