Are you looking for tips and answers about Saturday’s Connections instead? You can find them here:

ForbesTips and answers on today’s NYT’s “Connections” for Saturday, September 21From Kris Holt

Hi everyone! I hope you have a fantastic weekend. You deserve it.

Today’s NYT Connections Clues and answers coming soon.

How to play connections

Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. Every day at midnight you get a new puzzle. You can NYT Website or game app.

You are presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to sort these into four groups of four by finding the connections between them. The groups can be things like clickable items, names of participants in research studies, or words preceded by a body part.

Each puzzle has only one solution. You must be careful with words that could fit into more than one category. You can mix the words up to see if there are any connections between them.

Each group is color-coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to understand, blue and green are in between, and the purple group is usually the most difficult. The purple group often includes wordplay.

Choose four words that you think go together and press submit. If you guess wrong, you lose a life. When you’re close to getting a correct group, you may see a message letting you know that you’re one word away from the correct group, but you still need to figure out which one to swap out.

If you make four mistakes, it’s game over. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen with some tips. And if you’re really having trouble, today’s Connections Answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, you can easily share the results with your friends on social media and group chats.

What are today’s connection tips?

Scroll slowly! Immediately after the instructions for each of today’s Connections Groups, I will tell you which groups they are without immediately telling you which words belong in these groups.

Today’s 16 words are…

• PASTEL
• POOL
• SUNTAN
• SCULPTURE
• PRESS
• THIRD
• NEUTRAL
• DRAWING
• NEW
• ALLOY
• OPEN
• NEON
• LOTTERY
• SAVE
• Grayscale
• RAFFLE

And the clues for today’s groups are:

• Yellow group – colour variations
• Green group – often seen in laptop apps
• Blue group – whoever is there, wins
• Purple group – possible definitions for a dark orange-brown thing

What are today’s Connections groups?

Need additional help?

Be warned: We are starting to Spoiler area.

Today’s groups are …

• Yellow group – color types
• Green Group – File Menu Options
• Blue Group – Chance to win a prize
• Purple Group – what “Bronze” could mean

What are today’s Connections answers?

Warning, spoilers! Don’t scroll down until you’re ready to see today’s Connections Answer.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections Answers are …

• Yellow group – color types (GRAYSCALE, NEON, NEUTRAL, PASTEL)
• Green group – File menu options (NEW, OPEN, PRINT, SAVE)
• Blue Group – Chance to win a prize (DRAW, LOTTERY, TAP, RAFFLE)
• Purple Group – what “bronze” could mean (ALLOY, SCULPTURE, SUNTAN, THIRD)

Oh no, my seven-day winning streak is over.

I made a stupid mistake here. I was pretty sure about the blues from the start (and was right), but I went in a different direction and got the greens. Then I guessed PASTEL, SCULPTURE, GRAYSCALE and DRAWING, which got me a mistake because I knew in the back of my mind what the blue group was. That’s what I got next.

From then on, I was pretty confused. I made the following assumptions, none of which worked:

• PASTEL, SCULPTURE, GRAYSCALE and NEON
• PASTEL, SCULPTURE, THIRD and NEON
• PASTEL, ALLOY, GRAYSCALE and NEON

Sometimes it’s the yellow group that trips you up. There’s not much you can do about that if you don’t know them or can’t follow the breadcrumbs on a given day. I didn’t even notice that NEUTRAL fit with the other color-related words and was just guessing.

That’s the way it is. At some point I’ll break my 32-win streak. But tomorrow I’ll start again from the beginning. See you then.

That’s all for today Connections Hints and answers. If you need hints and the solution for Monday’s game, be sure to check out my blog.

PS: I missed the chance to see The National this week. I really like this band and have seen them a few times over the years, but unfortunately I had other plans. Here are my two favorite songs by them because today is Sunday, I’m being generous, and they both fit very well with fall: