Looking for Thursday’s Connections tips and answers instead? You can find them here:

ForbesNYT “Connections” tips and answers for Thursday, December 12thFrom Kris Holt

Hello! I hope you’ve recovered from yesterday’s game. That was a blast. Without giving too much away: today’s network is a return to normality.

Before we begin, I created a discussion group for Connections and this column on Discord. You can chat with me and other people about any game (and other topics). I’m always curious to see how other people approach the game, so join in! It will be fun.

It’s also the best way to give me feedback on the column, especially on the rare(!) occasions when I mess something up.

Today NYT Connections Hints and answers for Friday, December 13th 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 items 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…

• GARBAGE
• PHISH
• CRUSH
• TROLL
• Boring
• SPAM
• LEFT
• SQUIRT
• SPRITE
• TOWED
• GIANT
• DESIGNS
• ELEVEN
• SENT
• STARRY
• DRAGON

And the clues for today Connections Groups are:

• Yellow group – omnipresent in fairy tales
• Green Group – Commonalities in digital communication
• Blue group – fizzy drinks
• Purple Group – Fauna Soundalikes

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 – fantasy creatures
• Green group – email folder
• Blue Group – Citrus Lemonades
• Purple group – animal homophones

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 – fantasy creatures (DRAGON, GIANT, gnome, TROLL)
• Green Group – Email Folders (DRAFTS, SENT, SPAM, TRASH)
• Blue group – citrus lemonades (CRUSH, SPRITE, SQUIRT, STARRY)
• Purple Group – Animal Homophones (BORE, LINKS, PHISH, TOWED)

This is my third defeat in a row. Yikes! This is what happened to me:

🟪🟩🟩🟩

🟩🟩🟩🟩

🟨🟨🟨🟨

🟪🟦🟦🟦

🟪🟦🟪🟦

🟦🟦🟦🟪

There was a bit of an internet/email theme here today, given the rubbish, PHISH, TROLL, SPAM, LINKS, DRAFTs and SENT. So I figured the email types would be PHISH, SPAM, DRAFT and SENT. I was one away. I suspected PHISH was the outlier, and sure enough, I had the greens.

The yellows were then easy to spot in the rearranged starting lineup. The game then crowded CRUSH and SQUIRT together on the right side. I thought this might lead to a group of Find Nemo Characters (these are two of the turtles that Nemo and Dory ride a current with). I didn’t see any other obvious character names, so I tried SPRITE and PHISH. That kept me away from a group.

Since there was only one more present verb left, I replaced SPRITE with BORE. No dice. I didn’t have it, so I tried swapping PHISH for TOWED, but that didn’t work either.

I have never heard of SQUIRT and STARRY sodas and am only vaguely familiar with CRUSH. I probably should have recognized the purple tones though. When I saw PHISH, I thought I should keep all three meanings in mind: the animal homophone, the band, and the social engineering attack. But in the end I forgot all about it.

For those who are curious, the purple colors refer to boar (BORE), lynx (LEFT), fish (PHISH), and toad (TOWED).

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: I had another recommendation planned, but I’ll save it for another day now that I have time Find Nemo on the brain. What a beautiful, brilliant film this is.

I loved it in the theater and it was the first Blu-ray I saw on my first HDTV. Strangely, I can’t find a good official HD version of the original trailer on YouTube, so here’s one for the 3D re-release:

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, insight and analysis. It helps me a lot! Keep following me too Bluesky! It’s fun there.