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 12

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:

• pants
• features
• belt
• loop
• cuff
• fly
• pocket
• emit
• cast
• project
• radiate
• shed
• perspective
• angle
• position
• stance
• take

An Extra Hint for Each Connections Group

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

• 🟡Yellow group – has to do with what you wear on your lower half
• 🔵Blue group – light, sent
• 🟢Green group – how you look at things
• 🟣Purple group – ____(X)

One Word for Each Connections Group:

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

• 🟡Yellow group – cuff
• 🔵Blue group – radiate
• 🟢Green group – stance
• 🟣Purple group – russian

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

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

• 🟡Yellow group – Pants features
• 🔵Blue group – Emit
• 🟢Green group – Perspective
• 🟣Purple group – ____doll

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 – belt loop, cuff, fly, pocket
• 🔵Blue group – cast, project, radiate, shed
• 🟢Green group – angle, position, stance, take
• 🟣Purple group – paper (doll), rag (doll), russian (doll), troll (doll)

Here’s the finished grid:

Today’s Connections is rated 1/5 in terms of difficulty by the Connections Bot, which isn’t that surprising given how quickly I burned through this one. It’s funny how these puzzles try to trick us. They put “Fly” and “Paper” right next to each other on the grid, for instance, making us immediately think “fly paper” and make a mental connection right off the bat – one that is entirely meant to distract us from the true connections.

Still, there weren’t a lot of other red herrings here (at least that I noticed) and the Yellow words were super easy to find, freeing up the rest of the groups to pick over. I solved each of these groups in the “correct” order today: Yellow, Blue, Green, Purple, all in order of challenge. That usually doesn’t happen.

I’ll say this: Today’s Connections was way, way easier than last Sunday’s! That was a real head-scratcher. I prefer them difficult, however, so I’m a bit disappointed that today’s was such a breeze. Oh well!

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

Find more guides to Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword 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.