Connections, a wordplay game produced daily by The New York Times, is back with another mind teaser to start your day.
How to Play Connections
The free-to-play brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. Players need to discern the common theme for each category: yellow, green, blue, and purple.
The categories are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep the player on their toes. For instance, a past green category was anagrams, with the answers being pastel, petals, pleats, staple. Another example from the purple category is informal fried appetizers: ring, stick, tender, wing.
Players can be somewhat misled by words that might fit multiple categories, adding to the challenge. Each group, however, must contain four distinct words with no repeats. The difficulty escalates with color, starting with yellow as the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple being the toughest to crack.
The specific color of each category is only revealed after solving it. Players can shuffle the board to possibly simplify the guessing process.
The Times‘ puzzle editor Wyna Liu said that the categories’ difficulty varies daily. “Some categories might be defined by their use of wordplay—palindromes, homophones, adding or dropping letters and words—rather than the literal meanings of the words on the cards. I identified three areas where difficulty could be adjusted: the familiarity of the words, the ambiguity of their categorization, and the variety of the wordplay,” she said.
Below are some helpful tips to maintain your Connections winning streak—but proceed with caution if you prefer to solve the answers by yourself.
Connections, the free-to-play brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. Connections, the free-to-play brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. GETTY
Connections #372 Clues for Monday, June 17
Yellow: Something used to improve your appearance.
Green: Words to describe sending an object to another address.
Blue: Running into some difficulty.
Purple: The extents of which are all measured using the same metric.
