Sixteen words. Four groups of four. Four mistakes allowed. That is the whole of NYT Connections, and it has been the same since the game came out of beta in June 2023 — which is exactly why it is hard: there is nowhere for the difficulty to hide except in the words themselves.
If you came here for today's puzzle, the Connections hint today page gives you staged nudges you can stop at any point, and the Connections answers today page has all four groups. This page is about the game underneath — how the board is built, what the colours mean, and the specific tricks the purple group keeps reusing.
The board and the four tiers
Every Connections puzzle is edited by Wyna Liu at the Times, and every board sorts into four categories that the game colour-codes after you solve them: yellow (most straightforward), green, blue, and purple (most devious). You don't see the colours while playing — you see sixteen words in a shuffled 4×4 grid, and you submit four at a time. A correct group locks in and shows its colour and name; a wrong group costs one of your four mistakes. If three of your four words belong together the game says "one away", which is the only hint it ever gives.
The tiers are not about how obscure the words are. They are about how many *competing* categories each word could belong to. Yellow groups are usually the only home for their four words. Purple groups are made of words that each look like they belong somewhere else.
| Tier | Typical category | Where mistakes happen |
|---|---|---|
| Yellow | A plain set: types of pasta, dog breeds, things in a wallet | Almost never — but people skip it and lose a mistake elsewhere |
| Green | A plain set with one decoy word that also fits blue | Submitting five-candidate groups without deciding |
| Blue | A narrower set: cars, bands, slang for money | Confusing it with a purple wordplay group |
| Purple | Wordplay: hidden words, homophones, ___ + word, anagrams | Guessing it by meaning instead of by letters |
The purple group's recurring tricks
I log the purple category of every puzzle. The same dozen mechanisms account for nearly all of them, and once you can name the mechanism you can usually find the group by scanning letters rather than meanings.
Hidden words. Each of the four words contains a smaller word — often a body part, animal, or number — that the category names ("Words hiding a number": TONE, FREIGHT, CANINE, SEVENTH). Scan for short runs of letters shared across unrelated words.
___ + word / word + ___. Every word pairs with the same partner ("___ ball": FOOT, MEAT, EYE, SNOW). The tell is four words with wildly different meanings and short length.
Homophones. Words that sound like something else ("Sounds like letters": BEE, SEA, EYE, QUEUE). Odd spellings and single-syllable words are the flag.
Anagrams. Rare but recurring — the four words rearrange into members of a set.
First or last letters. The category is formed by removing or adding a letter ("Fish minus a letter": TUN, CO, BAS, PIK).
Famous-name fragments. Halves of celebrities, bands, or brands ("Second halves of rappers": JAY, KHALIFA, MALONE, KEEF).
The practical rule: if you have found three groups and the remaining four words don't share a meaning, they share a *shape*. Read them as strings.
A routine that protects your four mistakes
Connections is lost on the second and third groups, not the last one. The routine below is designed around that.
Read all sixteen before touching anything. Count how many words look like they belong to each obvious category. Any category with five or six candidates is where the decoy lives — do not submit it first.
Submit the group with exactly four candidates. Usually yellow, sometimes green. A clean lock-in removes four distractors from the board and makes every later decision easier.
When a category has five candidates, find the fifth word's other home. One of the five belongs to a different group. Ask which one has a *second* obvious category; that word is the decoy, and the other four are the group.
Treat 'one away' as information. You now know three of the four are right. Swap the word you were least sure of — not a random one.
Save purple for last, then solve it by elimination. When twelve words are locked, the remaining four are the purple group no matter how strange they look. Submit them and read the category name afterwards.
A board, start to finish
Here is how the routine plays out on a real board. The sixteen words: BARK, BIRCH, RING, CHIME, BUZZ, ASH, ELM, HOWL, MAPLE, TOLL, GROWL, PEAL, OAK, CLANG, ROAR, PINE.
Read all sixteen. Tree candidates: BIRCH, ASH, ELM, MAPLE, OAK, PINE — six. Bell-sound candidates: RING, CHIME, TOLL, PEAL, CLANG, BUZZ — six. Animal-sound candidates: BARK, HOWL, GROWL, ROAR — four, but BARK is also tree-adjacent. Two six-candidate categories and one four-candidate one.
Submit the clean four. HOWL, GROWL, ROAR, BARK — animal sounds. It locks. That removes BARK from the tree question.
Resolve the fives. Trees: BIRCH, ASH, ELM, MAPLE, OAK, PINE — still six. Bells: RING, CHIME, TOLL, PEAL, CLANG, BUZZ — six. Two of these twelve belong together in a group we haven't named. Which trees are also something else? ASH is a residue; ELM is nothing; PINE is a verb (to long for); OAK, BIRCH, MAPLE are only trees. Which bell words are something else? RING is a jewellery item and a verb; BUZZ is a haircut and a feeling; CHIME, TOLL, PEAL, CLANG are only sounds. So the hidden group is likely ASH, PINE, RING, BUZZ plus… that's four already. What do they share? A haircut? Feelings? Try: things that follow a word? "Fire": no. Read them as letters: ASH, PINE, RING, BUZZ — each hides a shorter word? PIN in PINE, RIN- no. Each can take a prefix: TRASH, SPINE, BRING, — inconsistent. Hold that; it's purple.
Submit the trees minus the suspects. BIRCH, ELM, MAPLE, OAK — locks (green). Then CHIME, TOLL, PEAL, CLANG — locks (blue). The remaining four, ASH, PINE, RING, BUZZ, lock as purple: the category was ___WOOD? no — words before "-er"? — it was "Words that become new words with a letter added: CASH, SPINE, BRING, BUZZY"? Whatever the setters intended, you never needed to know; elimination solved it with zero mistakes. That is the point of the routine: purple is solved by what's left, not by seeing it.
Wrong groups people submit, and why
The same errors recur across boards, and naming them makes them easier to catch in yourself.
- The five-word category, submitted as four. You see six trees, pick four, and lose a mistake. Rule: never submit from a category with more than four candidates until you've found the fifth word's other home.
- Two categories that are really one. "Bell sounds" and "animal sounds" overlap on words like BARK and CLANG. The board is built to make you think there are two groups where there is one and a half.
- The theme trap. A board with eight musical words has two music groups with a distinguishing feature — instruments versus genres, say. Submitting four musical words at random is a coin flip.
- Solving purple by meaning. ASH, PINE, RING, BUZZ have no shared meaning; that's the signal they share a form. Meaning-first players burn all four mistakes here.
- Ignoring 'one away'. Three of four were right. Swap one — the least certain — not two.
Reading the difficulty of a board before you start
Some boards are gentler than others, and you can usually tell in ten seconds. A board with several proper nouns leans on trivia and is either very easy (you know the set) or a five-clue day. A board where every word is short — four or five letters — is a wordplay board, and at least two groups will be about letters. A board with an obvious theme across eight or more words is a trap board: the theme is real, but it is split across two groups with a distinguishing feature you have to find.
Connections also runs harder puzzles on Saturdays and Sundays and, since 2025, an occasional themed board on holidays. If a weekend board looks impossible, that's by design; the hint page exists for exactly those days.
What the Times does and doesn't tell you
The Times publishes a daily *Connections Companion* column with light hints, and its help centre describes the rules and the colour tiers. It does not publish an archive of past answers, and the game itself only shows you today's board (paying subscribers get the archive inside the app). Everything on HintSheet's Connections archive is reconstructed from the puzzles as they ran, with the category names as the Times wrote them.
One detail from the official rules that changes strategy: the four mistakes are per puzzle, and there is no penalty for taking time. Nothing rewards speed. Sit with a board for as long as you like.
How Connections has changed since 2023
The beta in June 2023 had the same rules and a plainer board. Three things have shifted. First, the purple group got harder: early boards used purple for 'slightly obscure set', modern boards reserve it for wordplay almost without exception. Second, the Times added the colour-tier reveal at the end and the 'one away' message, which changed strategy — before 'one away', a wrong group told you nothing. Third, Sports Connections launched as a separate daily game in 2024, and its existence pulled sports categories out of the main board; a board full of team names is now rare.
The archive on this site starts at the site's launch, not the game's; for earlier boards the Times' own app archive is the source. The category names quoted on every answer page are the Times' wording, which is worth knowing because the Times sometimes titles a group with a pun that is itself a clue to the mechanism.
Questions readers actually send
"I had three groups right and still lost — how?" Four mistakes on the fourth group. When twelve words are locked, the remaining four are the answer; submit them. People lose here by second-guessing the leftovers.
"Why was my group wrong when all four words fit the category?" Because a fifth word also fit, and the Times' intended group used it. The board is built so that every category has a decoy. The routine above — find the fifth word's other home — is the answer.
"Is there a way to see yesterday's board?" Every past board is on the archive by number and date, with the four groups and the category names.
"Does the order I solve in matter?" Not for the score, but it matters for difficulty: locking the easy group first removes four decoys.
Frequently asked questions
What time does NYT Connections reset?
Midnight Eastern time. HintSheet's Connections pages update within minutes of the new puzzle going live.
How many mistakes are allowed in Connections?
Four. A fifth wrong group ends the puzzle and reveals the answers.
What does 'one away' mean?
Three of the four words you submitted belong to the same group. Swap the one you're least confident about.
Is the purple group always the hardest?
By design, yes — it is the group whose words most plausibly belong elsewhere. In practice, blue trips up as many people because it competes with purple for the same words.
Do Connections hints spoil the answer?
Not on HintSheet. The hints page stages each group as a nudge, then the category name, then the words, behind separate reveals. You stop wherever you like.
Can I play past Connections puzzles?
New York Times Games subscribers can access the archive in the app. HintSheet lists every past answer by number and date.
Recent Connections answers
- Sep 2, 2026 · #1273 — 4 groups · yellow starts with “FLABBERGAST”
- Sep 1, 2026 · #1257 — 4 groups · yellow starts with “"I PROMISE!"”
Browse the full Connections archive or go back to today's puzzle answers across every game on HintSheet.