How To Play Connections

Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here.

The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there.

There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can’t just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together.

You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you’re close, it will tell you that you’re one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles.

NYT Connections Hints And Answers – Sunday, April 26

Below, we’ll get into some extra hints for each Connections group – Yellow, Blue, Green and Purple – and then the official clues and answers.

Here are today’s Connections words:

• register
• mother
• caveat
• building
• tone
• spot
• strings
• pitch
• polyhedron
• fine print
• jane
• cliff
• catch
• clock
• range
• dick

An Extra Hint for Each Connections Group

Here’s an extra hint to help you solve each Connections group today:

• 🟡Yellow group – Just one thing…
• 🔵Blue group – Characters from classic elementary school primers
• 🟢Green group – Things to consider when singing
• 🟣Purple group – Each shares a similar characteristic

One Word for Each Connections Group:

Here’s one word from each group to help get you started:

• 🟡Yellow group – Caveat
• 🔵Blue group – Dick
• 🟢Green group – Range
• 🟣Purple group – Clock

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:

• 🟡Yellow group – Stipulation
• 🔵Blue group – Characters in “Dick and Jane”
• 🟢Green group – Vocal characteristics
• 🟣Purple group – Things with faces

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are:

• 🟡Yellow group – catch, caveat, fine print, strings
• 🔵Blue group – dick, jane, mother, spot
• 🟢Green group – pitch, range, register, tone
• 🟣Purple group – building, cliff, clock, polyhedron

Here’s the finished grid:

Today’s Connections felt a bit trickier than the 2/5 difficulty rating Connections Bot gives it, but maybe that’s just because I didn’t spot SPOT in the right context. I knew there was something about the Blue Group that connected it all for me, but it was lurking too deep in my memory to recall the old Dick and Jane primary school readers. SPOT is the dog. MOTHER is, well, the mother. DICK and JANE were the kids. There was also Puff the cat and Sally, another sister, and Father, of course.

In any case, I got the Purple words first, though it took me a couple tries. While CLIFF face and CLOCK face are both obvious, a BUILDING face or POLYHEDRON face are less so. I will grant that both the Yellow and Green groups were pretty easy today, however. I suppose that’s the CAVEAT.

How did you do on today’s Connections? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

Find more guides to Wordle, Pips and Strands on my blog where you can also follow me for TV and movie and video game coverage. Let me know if you have any fun puzzle games in your rotation that I should try on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Have a great Sunday!