The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

NEW YORK — Saturday's New York Times Connections puzzle, No. 1231, asked players to think about strips, sticks, internet ads and bars. One unusual advertising term caused trouble for at least one experienced solver.

Hints come first for players who want help without spoilers. The full answers follow farther down.

How Connections works

Connections presents a grid of 16 words that must be sorted into four groups of four. Each group is color-coded by difficulty:

Yellow: the most straightforward Green: moderate Blue: harder Purple: the trickiest, often based on wordplay

Players can make up to four mistakes. If a guess has three of the four words correct, the game displays a "One away" message.

Saturday's 16 words

The grid for Oct. 24, 2026, included:

BACON, COMIC, FILM, MÖBIUS, HOBBY HORSE, PINWHEEL, POPSICLE, SPARKLER, BANNER, INTERSTITIAL, OVERLAY, POP-UP, CANDY, SALAD, SPACE, SPORTS

Hints for each group

TechRadar puzzle writer Johnny Dee offered these hints:

Yellow: Come in narrow pieces. Green: A format you can hold. Blue: Methods of internet advertising. Purple: Add a word that rhymes with "car."

The red herrings

Several words could seem to fit more than one group.

BANNER can mean a cloth sign hung from poles, which might tempt players toward the group of things on sticks. On the internet, though, a banner is one of the most familiar ad formats.

PINWHEEL caused the most trouble for Dee. He rated the puzzle hard and finished with one mistake, after first guessing PINWHEEL as an online ad format. He then realized INTERSTITIAL, the full-screen ads that make users hunt for a close button, belonged there instead.

POPSICLE and POP-UP share a "pop" sound, which might also lead players to link them. They belong to different groups.

Today's Connections answers

Yellow — KINDS OF STRIPS: BACON, COMIC, FILM, MÖBIUS

Each word can come before "strip": a bacon strip, a comic strip, a film strip and a Möbius strip. A Möbius strip is a band with a half twist that has only one side and one edge.

Green — THINGS ON STICKS: HOBBY HORSE, PINWHEEL, POPSICLE, SPARKLER

A hobby horse is a toy horse's head mounted on a pole. Pinwheels spin on a stick, popsicles are frozen treats on a wooden stick, and sparklers are handheld fireworks on a wire stick.

Blue — ONLINE AD FORMATS: BANNER, INTERSTITIAL, OVERLAY, POP-UP

All four are common forms of internet advertising. Banners appear across the top or side of a page. Interstitials fill the screen between pages. Overlays sit on top of content, and pop-ups open in new windows.

Purple — ___ BAR: CANDY, SALAD, SPACE, SPORTS

Each word forms a familiar phrase when followed by "bar": candy bar, salad bar, space bar and sports bar.

Solving tips

Regular Connections players often use a few strategies:

Start with what you are sure of. Groups with only one possible set of four are safest to submit first. Count the candidates. If five words seem to fit a category, one is probably a decoy belonging elsewhere. Look for fill-in-the-blank patterns. Purple groups often add a word before or after each answer, as Saturday's "bar" category did. Learn from "One away." Swap one word at a time rather than starting over. Use the shuffle button. Rearranging the grid can reveal connections that are hard to see in the original layout.

On Saturday, the rarely used word INTERSTITIAL was a useful anchor. It fits almost nowhere except the ad category, so spotting it early could have helped players avoid Dee's mistake with PINWHEEL.

Other New York Times games

Connections is part of the Times' daily puzzle lineup alongside Wordle, Strands, Spelling Bee and The Mini Crossword. The Times also publishes Connections: Sports Edition, a separate puzzle built around athletes, teams and sports terms.

The Wordle answer for Saturday, Oct. 24, was HOLEY.

A new Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight local time.