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ForbesNYT “Connections” tips and answers for Thursday, December 5thFrom Kris Holt

Hello! Congratulations on making it to another Friday. Just a few hours until the weekend and a well-deserved break. Unless of course you are busy with work or something else over the weekend. In that case, I hope you can relax soon!

I just came across this Atlantic Interview with Wyna Liu, the editor of Connectionsfrom last week. It’s an interesting read that provides useful context on how Liu puts puzzles together and the thought process behind the construction.

One thing I totally agree with Liu on is that there’s nothing wrong with solving any puzzle the way you want. While I’m playing, I don’t look up the meaning of any terms (although I might do that later to understand the context), but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing that or, um, using a few hints when you need a little help.

And what do you know? Today NYT Connections Hints and answers for Friday, December 6th will follow soon.

How to play connections

Connections is a free, popular one New York Times daily pun. You will receive a new puzzle every day at midnight. You can play on that NYT Website or gaming app.

You will be presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to divide them into four groups of four by figuring out the connections between them. The groups can be, for example, elements that you can click on, names of research participants, or words preceded by a body part.

Each puzzle has only one solution, and you have to be careful when it comes to words that could fit into more than one category. You can mix up the words to perhaps better see the connections between them.

Each group is color coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to understand, blue and green are in the middle, and the purple group is usually the most difficult. The purple group often contains puns.

Select four words that you think go together and click Send. If you guess and are wrong, you lose a life. When you’re close to finding the right group, you may see a message saying you’re one word away from the right group, but you still need to figure out which word to swap.

If you make four mistakes, the game is over. Let’s make sure that this doesn’t happen with the help of some tips, and if you really find it difficult, even with today’s ones Connections Answer. Like with Wordle and other similar games, it’s easy to share results with your friends on social media and group chats.

If you have one NYT You can access the publications with the All Access or Games subscription Connections Archive. This includes every previous game from Connectionsso you can go back and play any songs you missed.

Aside from the first 60 or so games, you should be able to find my clues for each grid via Google if you need to! Simply click here and enter the date of the game for which you need hints or answers to the search query.

What are today’s connection notes?

Scroll slowly! Right after the clues for each of today’s Connections Groups, I will reveal what the groups are without immediately telling you what words appear in them.

Today’s 16 words are…

• PUZZLE
• MANIA
• BUZZ
• GOAL
• CORE
• HEX
• ANNOY
• REX
• SLINKY
• BLUNT
• SMALLPOX
• CONFUSE
• HEX
• HAMM
• CURSE
• PILLARDED

And the clues for today Connections Groups are:

• Yellow group – confusing, baffling
• Green group – used to bring bad luck to someone
• Blue group – you have a friend in it
• Purple group – informal endings

What are today’s sorority groups?

Do you need additional help?

Be warned: We’re starting to get into this Spoiler territory.

Today Connections Groups are…

• Yellow group – baffle
• Green Group – Curse
• Blue Group – Toy story Characters, familiar
• Purple group – colloquial suffixes

What are today’s connection solutions?

Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today Connections Answer.

This is your final warning!

Today Connections Answers are…

• Yellow Group – Baffle (PERPLEX, PUZZLE, STUMP, VEX)
• Green Group – Curse (HEX, JINX, POX, SPELL)
• Blue Group – Toy story Characters, well-known (BUZZ, HAMM, REX, SLINKY)
• Purple group – colloquial suffixes (CORE, GATE, MANIA, PILLED)

Not a perfect game, but that’s nine wins in a row. This is what happened to me:

🟦🟦🟦🟦

🟨🟨🟨🟨

🟪🟩🟩🟪

🟩🟩🟩🟩

🟪🟪🟪🟪

I’m a child of the 90s and Toy Story is basically my Star Wars. So I immediately got the blues. The yellow ones were pretty straightforward too.

However, I had a little trouble afterwards. My first guess about MANIA, JINX, HEX and PILLED didn’t really pan out in retrospect. JINX and POX ultimately had to fit together. This guess didn’t separate me from a group by one, but it did mean I had two shades of green and two shades of purple, which was useful information.

My next step was to swap MANIA and PILLED for POX and SPELL. That helped the Greens. I didn’t figure out the purple connection. It’s a very loose connection, but it makes sense.

The use of PILLED as a suffix – rather than as a verb for pilling fabric – is relatively new. It goes back to the concept of being redpilled, a term that comes from… The Matrix and Neo takes a red pill to find out the truth about his existence.

Spoilers for a 25 year old movie I think:

That’s all for today Connections Hints and answers. Be sure to check out my blog for tips and the solution for Saturday’s game if you need them.

PS: The first two words in today’s table mean “Puzzle Mania”. This is a special annual section in the print edition of The New York Times. It contains more than 50 puzzles, including a giant crossword puzzle related to a contest to win a $1,000 Visa gift card and other prizes.

In addition, there are special bite-sized print versions of Connections, Wordle, Spelling Bee and the Mini Crossword puzzle.

If you haven’t picked up the December 1st edition of the newspaper that included Puzzle Mania, you can order a copy of the section now from the NYT Store. If you’re lucky, you can still pick one up for free at select locations across the US

I wish you a wonderful day! Call someone you love!

If you feel like it, please do it Follow my blog for more coverage of Connections and other puns and even some video game news, insights and analysis. It helps me a lot! Keep following me too Bluesky! It’s fun there.