The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

NEW YORK — The New York Times' Connections puzzle for Tuesday, Sept. 29, challenged players with a grid that mixed simple synonyms, geography terms, animated movie titles and a tricky wordplay category built around hidden Greek letters.

Puzzle No. 1206 asked players to sort 16 words and phrases into four groups of four, a format that has made Connections one of the most popular daily games in The New York Times' lineup, alongside Wordle, Strands, Spelling Bee and the Mini Crossword.

Tuesday's grid rewarded players who could switch between everyday meanings and close attention to spelling. Puzzle guides singled out the purple category as the day's main obstacle, noting that one of the words in the river group could easily be mistaken for part of the Greek letter set.

This article includes hints first, followed by the full answers further below. Readers who want to solve the puzzle on their own should stop before the section marked "Answers."

How Connections works

Connections presents players with a four-by-four grid of 16 words. The goal is to find four groups of four items that share a common thread. Players select four words and press "Submit" to test a guess.

Each puzzle allows only four mistakes. After the fourth wrong guess, the game ends and reveals the answers.

The categories are color-coded by difficulty. Yellow is considered the most straightforward, followed by green and blue. Purple is typically the hardest and often involves wordplay, hidden words or unusual patterns.

Players who feel stuck can press the "Shuffle" button to rearrange the grid, which can help reveal connections that were not obvious in the original layout.

The New York Times launched Connections on June 12, 2023. The daily puzzles are edited by Wyna Liu. A new puzzle is released at midnight local time, so players in different time zones may be working on different puzzles at the same moment.

The grid

Tuesday's 16 entries were: HIDDEN, REMOTE, SECRET, TUCKED AWAY, DELTA, DRAINAGE BASIN, MOUTH, STREAM BED, FINDING, INSIDE, MONSTERS, TOY, FREEZE TAG, HOME GAME, MODEL TANK and ORAL PHASE.

Hints for each group

For players who want a nudge without the full answers, here are hints for each category, from easiest to hardest:

  • Yellow: Think of words describing a place or thing that few people know about or can reach.
  • Green: Think about water and geology, particularly the parts of a flowing body of water and the land around it.
  • Blue: Think of the beginnings of popular animated films from one well-known studio.
  • Purple: Look closely at the letters where words meet. Some phrases contain symbols from an ancient alphabet.

Strategy notes

The main trap on Tuesday involved the word DELTA. Because delta is also the name of a Greek letter, many players may have been tempted to place it in the purple group.

But DELTA belongs with the river terms. The Greek letter category instead depends on letters hidden across the space between two words in each phrase. MODEL TANK, for example, contains the same letters as DELTA when read across the gap, which makes the overlap especially tricky.

Players who focus on the sound or look of whole words may miss the purple group entirely. A useful approach is to read each two-word phrase as a single run of letters and look for familiar names hiding inside.

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The blue group also required some pop culture knowledge. Each word in the group is the first word of a title from a well-known animation studio's catalog. Players who recognized one or two titles likely found the rest quickly.

With a relatively clear yellow group, many experienced players recommend solving it first. Removing four words from the grid early reduces the chance of confusion in the harder categories.

Final warning: spoilers ahead

The complete answers for Connections No. 1206 appear in the next section. Players who want to keep trying should stop reading here.

Answers

Here are the solutions to the Sept. 29, 2026, Connections puzzle:

  • Yellow — Secluded: HIDDEN, REMOTE, SECRET, TUCKED AWAY
  • Green — River features: DELTA, DRAINAGE BASIN, MOUTH, STREAM BED
  • Blue — First words of Pixar films: FINDING, INSIDE, MONSTERS, TOY
  • Purple — Phrases hiding Greek letters: FREEZE TAG, HOME GAME, MODEL TANK, ORAL PHASE

Explaining the purple group

The purple category hid a Greek letter inside each phrase, spanning the space between the two words:

  • FREEZE TAG hides ZETA, formed by the end of "freeze" and the start of "tag."
  • HOME GAME hides OMEGA, formed across "home" and "game."
  • MODEL TANK hides DELTA, formed across "model" and "tank."
  • ORAL PHASE hides ALPHA, formed across "oral" and "phase."

Hidden-word categories like this one are a frequent feature of the purple group, which is designed to be the most difficult to spot.

Explaining the other groups

The yellow group gathered words that describe something secluded or out of view. HIDDEN, REMOTE, SECRET and TUCKED AWAY can all describe a place that is difficult to find or reach.

The green group featured geographic terms tied to rivers. A delta is the landform created where a river deposits sediment as it meets a larger body of water. A drainage basin is the area of land that channels water into a river. A river's mouth is where it empties into another body of water, and a stream bed is the channel along which water flows.

The blue group was built on the opening words of Pixar Animation Studios titles, including the "Finding Nemo," "Inside Out," "Monsters, Inc." and "Toy Story" franchises. Pixar, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Co., has produced some of the most successful animated films of the past three decades.

Other New York Times puzzles

The Times also released Wordle No. 1928 on Tuesday. Many players complete a daily lineup of the newspaper's games, including Strands, a themed word search; Spelling Bee, which challenges players to build words from seven letters; and the Mini Crossword, a small grid designed to be solved in a few minutes.

Players who want to revisit earlier puzzles can find past games in the Connections archive.

Streaks and sharing

Like Wordle, Connections lets players share their results as a grid of colored squares, showing the order in which they solved each group and any mistakes without revealing the answers. The feature has helped the game build a large social following since its launch.

Many players also keep track of streaks and try to solve the purple group first as a personal challenge, since it is the hardest to identify.

A new Connections puzzle, No. 1207, will be released at midnight local time Wednesday, Sept. 30.

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