Are you on a Connections winning streak but are stumped with today’s puzzle? Allow Newsweek to help you out.
Connections is a word game from The New York Times that gained popularity last year off the massive success of Wordle, which was created by software engineer Josh Wardle.
The answers for Friday’s Connections game will be revealed at the bottom of the page, so be careful while scrolling if you want to figure them out yourself.
How to Play Connections
The rules of the game are easy. Players are given a set of 16 words in a grid format. To be successful at the game, these words must be broken into four groups of four and placed into distinct categories based on similar themes or characteristics.
For example, in Thursday’s puzzle, one of the categories was, “NBA Legends/Familiarity” and the words associated with that category were “Bird,” “Curry,” “Kobe” and “Magic.”
In the past, categories have ranged from “Things people shake” to “Things to crack” and more.
There are levels of difficulty associated with each category—yellow is intended to be the easiest, while green and blue have medium levels of difficulty, and purple is considered the hardest.
To get started, players must choose four words they think are associated with one another and then click the “Submit” button. If the words are correct, they will appear in the difficulty color and will be removed from the board. If they are incorrect, they’ll remain on the board.
Players are given unlimited time to complete the puzzle but only have four guesses—so choose wisely.
Feeling particularly stuck? You can click the “Shuffle” button to refresh your brain.
Connections developer and puzzle editor at The New York Times, Wyna Liu, recently shared details about the game with Newsweek.
“My best piece advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing,” she said. “Don’t do what I do which is ‘rage solve.'”
When it comes to creating a puzzle, Liu said, “I usually don’t know where a board is going to go.” She added that it takes “a long time” to experiment and “try different angles.”
‘Connections’ #460 Clues for Friday, September 13
Newsweek has some clues to help you work out today’s Connections game.
Yellow: Having a lot of vigor
Green: Words that read the same backward or forward
Blue: Terms in a popular fairy tale
Purple: Vehicle names
‘Connections’ #460 Answers for Friday, September 13
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Yellow Category: VITALITY
Yellow Words: Energy, Juice, Life, Zip
Green Category: PALINDROMES FEATURING “E”
Green Words: Level, Pep, Refer, Tenet
Blue Category: FEATURED IN “JACK AND THE BEANSTALK”
Blue Words: Beans, Cow, Giant, Jack
Purple Category: CAR MODELS
Purple Words: Beetle, Civic, Focus, Volt
Did you answer correctly? Don’t stress if you didn’t. The next Connections puzzle will be back on Saturday.
Connections is released at midnight in your local time zone, and Newsweek will return with more helpful clues.
In the meantime, why not give these other popular online word puzzle games a go?