The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Puzzle number 1,203 of The New York Times' Connections game challenged solvers Saturday with a grid mixing breath-freshening products, laundry care terms, features found in wood, and a set of old-fashioned expressions all built around the word "cool," giving the day's puzzle an unexpectedly nostalgic wordplay twist in its toughest category.

Connections presents players with 16 words that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four, with each group sharing a common category. The puzzle rates each group's difficulty using a color system: yellow for the most straightforward connection, green for slightly trickier, blue for more difficult, and purple, typically the most wordplay-heavy or misleading group, as the hardest.

For those still working through Saturday's puzzle, here are hints for each category, organized from easiest to hardest, without giving away the specific words involved.

The yellow category groups together products people use to freshen their breath after eating or drinking something strong. The green category brings together specific actions typically performed on a dress shirt during a trip to the laundry or dry cleaner. The blue category, trickier by design, connects distinct physical features or characteristics found in wood, the kind of terminology a woodworker or carpenter would recognize immediately. The purple category, the puzzle's hardest by far, groups together words that can each follow the word "cool" to form somewhat dated expressions or phrases, several of which puzzle solvers themselves noted are rarely used in genuine everyday conversation anymore.

SPOILER WARNING: The full solution to Saturday's Connections puzzle follows below. Stop reading now if you'd rather work through the categories on your own.

Saturday's puzzle resolved into the following four groups. The yellow category, Breath Fresheners, consisted of GUM, MINT, MOUTHWASH and SPRAY, four common products used to combat bad breath. The green category, Things Done to a Dress Shirt at the Laundry, grouped FOLD, PRESS, STARCH and WASH, four processes a shirt might go through during a standard laundry or dry-cleaning visit. The blue category, Features of Wood, brought together BURL, GRAIN, KNOTS and RINGS, four terms describing distinct physical characteristics of wood, including burl, a deformed growth pattern in the wood grain that some solvers said they had never encountered before. The purple category, "Cool" Things in Expressions, consisted of BEANS, CAT, CUCUMBER and CUSTOMER, each of which can follow the word "cool" to form phrases such as "cool as a cucumber" or "cool customer," though several solvers noted these expressions have largely fallen out of common modern usage.

Puzzle guides covering Saturday's grid noted that the puzzle proved trickier than its initial yellow and green categories suggested, with the overlap between wood-related terminology and the more obscure "burl" tripping up solvers who were unfamiliar with the term. One puzzle blogger recounted initially solving the yellow category more broadly as "things that go in your mouth" before narrowing it specifically to breath-related products, and similarly identified the green category first as general laundry terms before recognizing its more specific focus on dress shirts. That same blogger described the purple category as conceptually strange, noting that expressions like "cool cat" are rarely heard in genuine conversation today despite remaining broadly recognizable through film and other media references.

Connections has grown into one of the Times' most consistently played daily puzzles since its official launch in 2023, ranking as the second-most popular NYT Games offering behind only the flagship crossword itself. The daily puzzle challenges players to identify links between groups of four words that may represent straightforward shared categories or more elaborate wordplay, with difficulty increasing as players move from the yellow tier toward the purple tier.

Players attempting Saturday's puzzle are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends, with each group color-coded upon a correct guess to indicate which of the four difficulty tiers it belongs to. Standard strategy for tackling the puzzle involves scanning the full grid first for any words that seem to have an obvious connection, then working through the remaining words methodically to identify the less immediately apparent categories, an approach that worked well for Saturday's more literal yellow and green groups but required more careful thought once solvers reached the wood-related and expression-based categories.

Players looking to track their performance on Saturday's puzzle, or compare notes with friends, can share their results through Connections' built-in results screen, which uses colored emoji squares to display a player's guessing sequence without revealing the actual category words, a sharable format that has become a familiar sight across social media in the years since the game's launch.

With Saturday's puzzle now solved, players will have a fresh set of 16 words and four new hidden categories to work through when Sunday's edition of Connections goes live at midnight local time, continuing the daily puzzle's steady run as one of the Times' most widely shared games alongside Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword.

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