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, June 21

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:

• barbados
• community
• diggity
• dissect
• drizzle
• floors
• friends
• rain
• rocks
• scrubs
• showers
• slapdash
• sprinkles
• stuns
• surprises
• wings

Here’s an Extra Hint for Each Connections Group

• 🟡Yellow group – Tut tut, it looks like _____
• 🔵Blue group – Funny TV shows
• 🟢Green group – When someone delivers big, shocking news
• 🟣Purple group – First part of each word is a disparaging comment

One Word for Each Connections Group:

• 🟡Yellow group – Rain
• 🔵Blue group – Wings
• 🟢Green group – Stuns
• 🟣Purple group – Diggity

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

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

• 🟡Yellow group – Precipitation
• 🔵Blue group – NBC Sitcoms
• 🟢Green group – Bowls Over
• 🟣Purple group – Starting With Kinds Of Insults

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. The Connections answers are:

• 🟡Yellow group – drizzle, rain, showers, sprinkles
• 🔵Blue group – Community, Friends, Scrubs, Wings
• 🟢Green group – floors, rocks, stuns, surprises
• 🟣Purple group – BARBados, DIGgity, DISSect, SLAPdash

Here’s the finished grid:

Today’s NYT Connections was a 2/5 on the Connections Bot difficulty scale. Once again, this one looked harder than it ended up being, though the Yellow words were pretty obvious off the bat. Or maybe I just have rain on the brain since wildfires have already come to our neck of the woods, alas.

I knew, when I saw the word BARBADOS and nothing that it could obviously belong to, that this was a Purple word. So I took the first syllable – barb – and looked for other words with similar meanings. Well, there was DIGGITY with “dig” and DISSECT with “diss” and while it might seem the most obvious, SLAPDASH was the one I worried about when I made my guess.

I’m honestly a little surprised I ended on the Blue group today, given I’m a TV writer and these are all TV shows. Then again, I was never a big fan of any of these, though I do think I need to watch COMMUNITY at some point. And SCRUBS. Probably WINGS also. I was more of a Seinfeld guy, or The Office, back when I watched sitcoms.

How’d 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!