Do you live in one of the cities where Connectionsis the most popular?
The New York Times‘ daily word game has become a huge hit in the 12 months it has been online, but it is in New York City, Chicago, Sydney, Melbourne, Brooklyn, Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, Philadelphia and Minneapolis where Connections is a really big hit.
It is edited by Wyna Liu, the Times‘ puzzle editor, who shared her tips for playing with Newsweek.
“My best piece of advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing,” Liu said earlier this month. “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.
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.
New York Times
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 Quentin Tarantino films 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, a word can sometimes belong to more than one category—but there is only one correct answer.
Connections #387 Clues for Tuesday, July 2
Yellow: Words for putting things away.
Green: Describing words for financial items you own.
Blue: Words in the language used in Ancient Rome.
Purple: These words appear before the name of an activity that one does for amusement, fun or sport.
Connections #387 Answers for Tuesday, July 2
Yellow category: PACK AWAY FOR FUTURE USE
Yellow answers: Squirrel, Stash, Store, Stow
Green: ADJECTIVES FOR ASSETS
Green answers: Fixed, Frozen, Liquid, Toxic
Blue: LATIN WORDS
Blue answers: Caveat, Ergo, Quid, Vox
Purple: _________ GAME
Purple answers: Arcade, Blame, Numbers, Squid
Did you guess the answers correctly? If so, congratulations! If not, there will be another opportunity to crack the puzzle tomorrow.
Connections is released at midnight in your local time zone. Newsweek will be back with another round of hints and tips for each new game.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.