Answers and Clues for August 9
Looking for Friday’s NYT Connections hints, clues and answers instead? You can find them here:
It’s Saturday, but that’s no reason to break your Connections streak. I would say this puzzle is on the easy side today, so you may be just fine. Still, here are clues and answers
How to Play Connections
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.
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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. So, onto the hints and answers:
What Are Today’s Connections Hints?
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.
- TISSUE
- WORK
- PLUCK
- CONSTRUCTION
- CRUSH
- CREPE
- CREAM
- RESOLVE
- ROLLING
- REPAIRS
- SHELLAC
- TOILET
- GRIT
- ROUT
- UPGRADES
- FORTITUDE
The hints for the Connections groups today are:
- Blue Group – No mercy
- Yellow Group – Inner strength
- Green Group – Hope you have good contractors
- Purple Group – Thin
What Are Today’s Connections Groups?
Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:
- Blue Group – Trounce
- Yellow Group – Intrepidy
- Green Group – Renovations
- Purple Group – Kinds of Soft/Lightweight Paper
What Are Today’s Connections Answers?
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:
- Blue Group – Trounce (CREAM, CRUSH, ROUT, SHELLAC)
- Yellow Group – Intrepidy (FORTITUDE, GRIT, PLUCK, RESOLVE)
- Green Group – Renovations (CONSTRUCTION, REPAIRS, UPGRADES, WORK)
- Purple Group – Kinds of Soft/Lightweight Paper (CREPE, ROLLING, TISSUE, TOILET)
For Blue Group, I’m not sure I’ve heard SHELLAC used in any other context than dominating something or someone else, so the rest of the clues followed from that so long as you didn’t think CREAM was some sort of food.
For Yellow Group – Good thing they didn’t put Intrepidy as one of the clues, because that’s a word I’ve almost never heard. The rest of these I thought fell in line pretty easily, albeit PLUCK could be the actual action. But it was not.
Green Group gave me PTSD from a number of projects I’ve done in the past where REPAIRS made things worse and WORK did not go as quickly as it should have. But at least it was easy to piece these together.
Purple Group, as ever, is pretty tricky, but I lucked out just thinking of CREPE as a thin food, which still worked within the category. TISSUE and TOILET seemed easy to connect as types of paper, so that was the first big link that lets you get the others.
How did you do today pre-hints?
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