NYT Games answers today: Connections, Wordle, Strands and Spelling Bee, with hints first

Today's NYT Games answers

Four games, three reset times

The Times games do not share a clock. Connections and Strands change at midnight Eastern. Wordle changes at midnight in your local time zone, so a player in California gets it three hours after a player in New York — HintSheet publishes on the Eastern date. Spelling Bee changes at 3:00 AM Eastern, and yesterday's Bee stays playable until then. The mini crossword and the daily crossword change at 10 PM Eastern the night before, which is why they aren't covered here: their answer traffic is a different business run by different sites.

Hints before answers, by design

The most common complaint about puzzle answer sites is that they spoil the puzzle you only wanted a hint for. HintSheet's Times pages separate the two intents. The hints page for each game stages information from least to most revealing — for Connections, a nudge per group, then the group name, then the words; for Wordle, vowel count, then repeats, then first letter, then the word; for Strands, the theme's meaning, then the spangram's shape, then first letters — each behind a reveal you have to tap. The answer page shows everything at once with no clicks, for people who are done.

Nothing on a hints page is visible until you ask for it, and the answer is always the last reveal, never the first. If you land on an answer page by mistake, the hints page is linked in the first line.

How the four puzzles are built

Connections (edited by Wyna Liu) is four groups of four words, colour-graded from yellow to purple by how many competing categories each word could belong to. The purple group is nearly always wordplay — hidden words, homophones, shared partner words — and the Connections guide catalogues the mechanisms.

Wordle (edited by Tracy Bennett) is a five-letter word chosen by hand from a curated list; plurals ending in S are avoided. The Wordle guide has the letter-frequency data and the opener rankings, and the Wordle solver ranks your next guess from what you've already tried.

Strands is a 6×8 letter grid partitioned completely into a spangram and a handful of theme words. The Strands guide covers the theme registers and the edge-first method for finding the spangram.

Spelling Bee (edited by Sam Ezersky) is seven letters in a hive; make words of four or more using the centre letter. The word list is curated, unpublished, and reconstructed by every answer site; the Spelling Bee guide explains the scoring and the solver does the hive for you.

Where the answers come from and how they're checked

Each puzzle is read from the Times' own game as it goes live and published here at reset. Connections, Wordle and Strands are exact — they are the puzzle's data, not a transcription. Spelling Bee's word list is computed from the day's letters against a public-domain dictionary, because the Times does not publish its accepted list; the pangram is reliable, and the list may differ from the official one by a handful of words, which the page says plainly.

Every page shows the puzzle number and date. Past puzzles are in each game's archive, browsable by month and by number.

What the Times publishes itself

The Times runs a *Connections Companion* column and a *Wordle Review* with light hints, and the Spelling Bee Forum in the comments of its daily post is the closest thing to an official Bee word list. It does not publish Strands hints, and it does not publish a free archive of any game's answers — subscribers get past puzzles inside the app. None of that is a criticism; it's why sites like this one exist, and why the guides here try to add something the Times doesn't: the strategy and the data, not just the answer.

A weekly rhythm worth knowing

Connections and Strands run harder boards on weekends. Wordle's difficulty is flat by design. Spelling Bee's maximum score varies with the letters and is highest when the centre letter is a vowel. If you keep a streak across all four, Saturday is the day to give yourself the extra ten minutes.

The Times' editors, and why it matters

Each game has a named editor — Wyna Liu for Connections, Tracy Bennett for Wordle, Sam Ezersky for Spelling Bee, with Strands edited by the Games team — and their preferences are learnable. Liu's purple groups favour hidden words and shared partners; Bennett's Wordle answers avoid obscurity and plurals; Ezersky's Bee accepts most inflections and rejects most jargon. Reading the editor is a real skill in these games, and the guides on this site are organised around it: the Connections guide catalogues Liu's mechanisms, the Wordle guide lists Bennett's constraints, the Bee guide tabulates Ezersky's accepted oddities.

Reader questions about NYT games

"Do I need a subscription?" Wordle, Connections and Strands are free; Spelling Bee shows a limited free version and the full game needs a Games subscription.

"Why is Wordle's answer different for my friend?" Time zones — the puzzle changes at local midnight. Compare puzzle numbers, not dates.

"Is there an official archive?" For subscribers, in the app. This site's archive is free.

"Does the Times publish hints?" Yes — the Connections Companion and Wordle Review columns, and the Bee Forum comments.

How HintSheet's NYT pages differ from the big publishers'

Most NYT answer pages on the internet come from large publishers — gaming and technology sites that run a daily article per game. They are fine, and they are long: hundreds of words of preamble before the hint, often with the answer on the same page as the hints. HintSheet's pages are built the other way round. The hints page is hints only, staged. The answer page is the answer first. The strategy lives on the game's guide, once, rather than being re-typed daily. If you want the daily essay, the publishers have it; if you want the answer or a single nudge, this is faster.

The other difference is the boards. Connections is shown as the sixteen-word grid, solved in colour; Strands as the letter grid with the spangram lit; Spelling Bee as the hive. They're rendered from the puzzle data, not screenshots, so they're sharp at any size and load instantly.

A glossary of Times-games terms

Used across the four guides.

• Tier (Connections) — the colour-coded difficulty band of a group.
• One away (Connections) — three of four submitted words belong together.
• Spangram (Strands) — the theme-describing word spanning two opposite edges.
• Pangram (Spelling Bee) — a word using all seven letters.
• Genius / Queen Bee (Spelling Bee) — 70% of maximum score / every word.
• Hard mode (Wordle) — revealed hints must be used in later guesses.

Reader questions, second round

"Which NYT game is hardest?" By solve rate, Connections' purple group and Spelling Bee's Queen Bee; by time, a hard Strands board.

"Do the games share an account?" Yes — one Times account tracks streaks across all four.

"Why is Spelling Bee's list different everywhere?" Because the Times doesn't publish it; every site computes its own.

"Is Sports Connections covered?" Not at present.

A month of Times games, by the numbers

Rough figures from the puzzles logged here, to set expectations.

Glossary, continued

A few more terms from the four guides.

• Register (Strands) — the kind of theme phrase: literal, punning, fill-in-the-blank, mechanism.
• Decoy (Connections) — a word that fits an obvious category but belongs to another group.
• Opener (Wordle) — the first guess; SLATE, CRANE, TRACE are the data's picks.
• Bingo (Spelling Bee) — a community term for a day when every letter starts a word.

Playing all four in twenty minutes

A routine that works for people who keep four streaks. Wordle first, because it's fastest and warms up the letter sense — two to four minutes. Connections next while attention is fresh; read all sixteen before touching anything — four to six minutes. Strands third; find the spangram from the edges — five to eight. Spelling Bee last and open-ended: pangram, four-letter sweep, suffixes, then stop at Genius — ten to fifteen. Total under half an hour, and the hint pages here are built to be opened mid-game on a phone without spoiling the next puzzle.

The archive for each game

Every Times puzzle published here has a numbered page — Connections #1,179, Wordle #1,901, Strands #1,100 — and a month page listing the run. Spelling Bee is filed by date. The archives are the quickest way to answer 'what was Tuesday's purple group' and, read in bulk, the best way to learn each editor's habits: a month of Connections purple groups makes the mechanism list on the guide concrete, and a month of Wordle answers makes the letter table real.

Corrections and the Times' own errata

The Times occasionally corrects a puzzle after release — a Connections category renamed, a Spelling Bee word added to the accepted list mid-morning. When that happens the affected HintSheet page is updated the same day and the change is dated in the page's byline. Reports of a mismatch between the site and the game go to the contact page and are checked against the game itself before anything is changed; the archive keeps the corrected version with a note.

Every NYT Games guide on HintSheet

• NYT Connections: rules, the four difficulty tiers, and a method for the purple group — NYT Connections explained: the 16-word board, the yellow-to-purple difficulty tiers, the recurring purple-group tricks, and a routine for solving without burning your four mistakes. Daily hints and answers linked.
• Wordle answer, hints and solver — the numbers behind five letters and six guesses — Wordle answer today, staged hints, and a solver that ranks your next guess. Plus the letter-frequency data behind good openers, the hard-mode trade-off, and what the answer list actually looks like.
• NYT Strands: how the theme, the spangram and the hint system really work — NYT Strands explained: the 6×8 letter grid, how theme words and the spangram are laid out, how the three-word hint system works, and a way to read the theme before you find a single word.
• Spelling Bee answers, pangrams and the solver — plus the rules nobody reads — NYT Spelling Bee answers today with every word by length and the pangram, a solver for any hive, and the rules that decide which words count: the four-letter floor, the centre letter, Queen Bee scoring.

Other pillars: LinkedIn Games · Dle Games. Or go back to today's puzzle answers across every game.

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