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Connections is a game from the New York Times that challenges you to find the association between words. It sounds easy, but it isn’t—Connections categories can be almost anything, and they’re usually quite specific. If you need a hand getting the answers, we’ve got you covered.
What Is Connections?
Connections is a puzzle game from the New York Times. The objective is simple: sort 16 words into groups of 4. Each group of words will be connected by some common idea or theme. That common element could be anything from the number of letters in the words to a common use for all the words. Once you’re confident, select 4 words, then hit “Submit.” You have only four attempts in total, so don’t be too guess-happy.
Hints for Today’s Connections Categories
Here are a few small hints to get you started on the 295th Connections game.
Blue, Computer, Poker, Potato
How Did We Solve This Puzzle?
We felt that the puzzle for March 27th was slightly harder than yesterday’s puzzle. Four words immediately jumped out asalmostsynonyms—fix, revise, amend, and correct—so we immediately tried lumping them together. Looking for synonyms is consistently a good way to get answers in Connections, and today was no exception. They all fit into the category “Update For Accuracy.”
Next, we noticed that several words are related to gambling. Poker, roulette, and lottery are all gambling games. Bingo is also a gambling game, but it can also be an expression that means someone has gotten something correct. However, no other words on the board seem to match that idea, so we tried going with “gambling” as a category, and included poker, roulette, bingo, and lottery.
That turned out to be wrong, and required a reevaluation. Thinking about it more carefully, bingo, lottery, and roulette all have one thing in common: they’re gambling based purely on chance. Poker, on the other hand, has some strategy involved, so we discarded that one as the outlier. There are a number of words on today’s puzzle that are related to conflict of some kind: fight, tiff, row, scrap, and war.
Of those, war is also a card game based purely on chance (unless you’re stacking the deck!), and the other words tend to imply small-scale conflicts, rather than something involving entire nations. Throwing together roulette, bingo, lottery, and war was correct, and the category was “Games of Chance.”
The remaining options are now less muddy than they were originally. It is more obvious that tiff, fight, scrap, and row fit together, as all of those words are related to conflict. The category the New York Times chose was quarrel.
That leaves just blue, computer, potato, and poker. The category was ___ chip. Of those, computer chip, potato chip, and poker chip are all quite common. However, blue chip is a bit more obscure.
A blue chip,according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “a stock issue of high investment quality that usually pertains to a substantial well-established company and enjoys public confidence in its worth and stability.” Like Enron, or Lehman Brothers.
How Do You Guess Connections Categories?
There is no quick, reliable way to approach Connections like there is with Wordle, since Connections isn’t algorithmic. However, there are a few things to keep in mind that can help.
If you didn’t solve this one, don’t feel too bad—there’s always tomorrow! And those words may align with a topic you’re interested in, giving you a leg up on the competition.
