Looking for a little help with your Sunday Connections puzzle? If you’re looking for extra clues – or the answers – you’ve come to the right place. Below you’ll find an extra set of hints, the categories for each group and, finally, the solution to today’s puzzle.
September is behind us and the first Sunday of October is here. Halloween is on a Friday this year, which is great news for trick-or-treaters and party-goers alike. The leaves aren’t changing just yet, and the days are still warm, but the nights are chilly and the leaves will be changing soon. Then they’ll be falling and making a mess.
As always, my weekend streaming guide is live with another bevy of new TV shows and movies to watch. There’s plenty of new stuff streaming this first weekend of October.
Alright, Connectioneers, let’s connect some words!
If you’re looking for Saturday’s Connections guide, it’s right here.
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.
These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers. First, here are today’s Connections words:
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
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:
I enjoyed today’s Connections for a couple reasons. First of all, it was a nice challenge. The Blue Group, in particular, was basically just a collection of red herrings. It was also much more difficult than your typical Blue category, unless you’re a big fan of Madonna.
Unsurprisingly, I got the Yellow words connected first. I have a lot of houseplants and watering them is a real chore (as in, quite literally, a chore but also figuratively a pain). I thought they were almost too obvious.
Oddly enough, I managed to group the Purple words next. It was GETAWAY that was the giveaway. I pretty much only associate that word with cars. If you just want to get away from someone or something, you type out both words. So I looked for other car words and found BUMPER and CLOWN and for whatever reason, didn’t think of SPORTS in that way. After much pondering, it finally dawned on me. It’s funny, because sportscars are probably the most common of the batch. I suppose I was looking for other off-beat types of cars. Is there a MUSIC car? A CHERISH car?
In any case, with those out of the way I found myself more puzzled than ever, but eventually thought of FLOOR as in “He was floored by the revelation” and figured I could combine that with ROCK – as in, “The news rocked her world” – and SHAKE - as in “They were shaken by the announcement” – and SHOCK -- as in “The shock was almost too much for them to take.” Sure enough, those were the Green words.
I still had no clue what the Blue words connections was (we really need a poison word!) but I got this group by default. Madonna songs! That could be a Purple category!
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. Read my weekend streaming guide right here.