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NYT ‘Connections’ Hints June 18: Clues and Answer for Game #373

Published 3 months ago iNFO Vi3m ago • Bookmarks: 3

Connections is a challenging word game that has proved a big hit, but sometimes it can be really hard to play.

Wyna Liu helped develop Connections for The New York Times and it has become its second-most-played game after Wordle.

“The response has been really incredible and overwhelming, and unexpected,” Liu told Newsweek earlier this month.

The game’s editor shared some handy hints on how to make sure you’re playing Connections to the best of your abilities.

“Connections” is the latest New York Times game to prove a big hit.
“Connections” is the latest New York Times game to prove a big hit.
New York Times

“My best piece advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing,” she said. “You may see the board and have completely identified the category, seeing five words that could belong in that category.”

“Don’t try to guess the four words in that category, because even though you know what the fifth member is, you won’t know which of the four it might not be,” which would ultimately waste a turn.

By trying your hand at finding another category first, it is likely to remove the words that could belong to more than one group, ultimately meaning there’s less chance to commit an error, because “your four guesses go by extremely quickly.”

Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and the answers for Tuesday’s puzzle are toward the end of the article, so scroll with caution.

How To Play ‘Connections’

The brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, a recent game linked the words “clear,” “earn,” “make” and “net,” which all came under the category “take home, as income.”

Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and purple. However, the puzzles are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep things interesting.

The uniting themes can come from a broad range of categories—anything from Halloween costumes to geometric terms.

If all four words are correctly placed into each set, those words will be removed from the board. Each incorrect guess counts toward the mistake tally. Up to four errors can be made before it’s game over.

Players can shuffle and rearrange the board if they want to try to make the process of guessing the connections easier.

To make things a bit tougher for players, a word can sometimes belong to more than one category—but there is only one correct answer.