Keep Your Connections Winning Streak Alive This Saturday!

Saturday is finally here but that doesn't mean you should give up your Connections winning streak—or stop yourself from starting a new one if you recently ran out of luck. The brainteaser was launched by The New York Times in June of last year and has quickly gone on to become the newspaper's second-most-played game behind Wordle.

If you've never played before, Connections challenges players to uncover threads connecting a series of words. Instructions on how to play the game are below, as are clues and the answers for today's puzzle. Scroll with caution if you'd like to figure them out for yourself.

Woman using phone — A woman holds a cellphone. Newsweek has hints, tips, and answers for today's "Connections" puzzle. Davidovici/Getty Images

How to Play Connections

In Connections, players are tasked with grouping words together by matching them by themes or categories. There are 16 words in the game in total, and each group of words is separated into four categories. For example, Friday's game linked the words "bond," "M," "Moneypenny" and "Q"—which all came under the category "characters in Bond movies."

The board is color-coded to indicate the different levels of difficulty. Yellow is the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Once you correctly link four words, their color will be revealed, letting you know how difficult the quiz-setters considered that part of the puzzle to be.

Sometimes a red herring is thrown in to confuse people, which is when a word can belong to more than one category but there is only one correct answer. If stuck, people can hit the shuffle button, which will mix up where the words appear on the screen.

Wyna Liu is a crossword editor at The New York Times who was asked to develop Connections. During a conversation with Newsweek, Liu said she knows that while people enjoy playing the game, they also can get "mad" at it. She has shared some advice for players:

Wait as long as you can before guessing. You may see the board and have completely identified the category, seeing five words that could belong in that category.
Don't try to guess the four words in that category, because even though you know what the fifth member is, you won't know which of the four it might not be, which would ultimately waste a turn.
She added: "Don't do what I do which is 'rage solve.'"