Connections answers archive

October 2026 (19)

September 2026 (30)

Finding a board when you only half remember it

Search by number or by date. The # column is the puzzle number the game itself shows on your share grid, counted from #1 on 12 June 2023, so a number a friend sends you matches the row here. Each month has its own table with a count beside the month name, and within a month the newest day sits at the top. The summary line names the yellow group, so if you remember an easy category from a particular day, your browser's find-in-page will usually land on it. If you remember a harder group instead (a purple about Chinese dynasties, say), open the days around the time you think it ran; every day page lists all four groups by name.

Each month has its own table with a count beside the month name, and within a month the newest day sits at the top. The summary line names the yellow group, so if you remember an easy category from a particular day, your browser's find-in-page will usually land on it. If you remember a harder group instead (a purple about Chinese dynasties, say), open the days around the time you think it ran; every day page lists all four groups by name.

Each day page shows the sixteen words coloured by group, with each category name and its four words, so one page settles both which group a word belonged to and what the category was called. If you want to replay a board, cover the colours and names and try to sort the words before you look.

Purple, tallied across 41 boards

Purple is the fourth group, the one built to be the hardest. I read every purple category name in the window and sorted each into the mechanism it uses. The sorting is my own; the category names are the Times' own, copied as published, and the numbers are the game's puzzle numbers.

Reading those counts as a player

37 of 41 purple groups were wordplay. Only four asked you to know a set of things by meaning. That is the single most useful fact in this archive: when four words are left over and none of the meanings line up, stop thinking about meaning and start looking at letters.

Edges beat middles. Sixteen purples hid a word at the start or the end of each entry (six at the start, ten at the end), while only two hid one in the middle. So scan the first three or four letters and the last three or four letters of each leftover word before trying anything cleverer. ENDING IN ACTORS NAMED TOM (#1215) and ENDING IN TALENTS (#1213) both fall to that scan in seconds once you know to run it.

Blanks hide in plain sight. The twelve partner purples paired with LOVE, PRIME, SILENT, AIR, ALERT, FORCE, CASE, GRASS, BOXING, BOARDS, DOGS and BEST ___ TONY AWARDS. When a board leaves you with four ordinary nouns that share nothing, try putting one common word in front of or behind all of them. It is the most frequent purple trick in the window, and it is the one people miss because each word looks innocent on its own.

Drills that use old boards

Past boards are useful practice only if you play them in a way that tests the skill you are missing. Four ways to use the list above:

• Purple-only pass. Open a day, cover the category names, look at the four purple words and name the trick before reading the answer. Forty-one boards means forty-one repetitions of the hardest skill in the game.
• Decoy hunt. On each solved board, find a word from one group that would also fit another group's category. The hub explains that every board is built with decoys; spotting them on a solved board trains you to spot them on a live one.
• Edge-scan timing. Pick five STARTING WITH or ENDING IN days from the table and time how long it takes to see the hidden words once you know where to look. Aim for under a minute per board.
• Blank test. For the twelve partner purples, read only the four words and try likely fronts and backs (LOVE, AIR, SILENT, CASE) until one sticks. The exact partner changes every time, but the feeling of four unrelated nouns becomes recognisable fast.

One board, four groups of wordplay

On 3 October 2026 (#1210) every group, not just purple, was a letter trick. It is the only board in the window where all four category names begin with STARTING WITH or ENDING IN. The four names, as published:

It is the best single day to replay if edge-scanning is your weak spot, because the colour tiers came down to how familiar the hidden words were rather than which trick was in play. Yellow and purple used the same mechanism; only the vocabulary changed.

STARTING WITH TERMS FOR “TOILET” · ENDING IN MUSICALS · STARTING WITH U.S. MUSEUMS · ENDING IN FANTASY CREATURES— NYT Connections #1210, 3 October 2026

Same editor every day?

Yes, across this window. All 41 entries credit Wyna Liu, which matches the hub's note that she edits the game. One editor means one voice, and that voice repeats frames. Costume parts turned up three times in three different tiers (FEATURES OF A MIME COSTUME in green, PARTS OF A VAMPIRE COSTUME in yellow, PARTS OF A JUDGE COSTUME in blue), and dress shirts twice (THINGS DONE TO A DRESS SHIRT AT THE LAUNDRY, DRESS SHIRT MEASUREMENTS). The second time a frame appears, you can list its likely members before you even read the board.

Blue had its own habits. Film sets landed there four times (HORROR MOVIES, HUGH JACKMAN MOVIES, VAMPIRE MOVIES, GANGSTER MOVIES), and four blue groups were fill-in-the-blanks (___ DOGS, ___HEAD, ___ HEART, ___ INN HOTELS). If purple is done and blue will not resolve, a blank is worth trying there too.

Yellow groups: definitions in disguise

By my reading, 22 of the 41 yellow groups were definition groups: a meaning such as CALM, SECLUDED, LUXE or PUT TO USE, with four words that all mean it. Those are the groups the routine on the hub tells you to look for first, and the archive bears that out. On 1 October (#1208) the yellow meaning was PUT, with PLACE, POSITION, SITUATE and STICK; ten days later (#1218) yellow was PUT TO USE. Replaying those two back to back shows how the same idea gets reworded to stay fresh.

Yellow is also where a trick can hide in plain sight. ENDING IN METAL ELEMENTS (#1193) and STARTING WITH TERMS FOR “TOILET” (#1210) were both yellow. Two in 41 is rare, but it is enough to drop the habit of assuming the easiest group is always a plain set.

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