The New York Times Connections
The New York Times Connections

Sunday's New York Times Connections puzzle offered a relatively gentle challenge, according to solvers and puzzle trackers, with one weather-themed category proving the biggest stumbling block for players working through today's grid. Here's a full breakdown of today's puzzle, along with hints for anyone still working through it before checking the answers.

How Connections works

Connections, one of the Times' most popular daily word games alongside Wordle, presents players with 16 words or short phrases that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four. Each group shares a connection — sometimes a straightforward category, other times a wordplay trick or shared cultural reference — and the puzzle rates each group by difficulty using color coding: yellow for the most straightforward group, followed by green, then blue, and finally purple for the trickiest and most conceptual connection. The game resets daily at midnight in each player's local time zone.

Today's category hints

For players who want a nudge before seeing the full solution, today's puzzle broke down as follows. The yellow group centered on early childhood milestones — moments parents typically celebrate during a baby's development. The green group involved once-common gadgets and formats that, while nostalgic, would no longer be considered cutting-edge technology today. The blue group gathered different expressions for rainy weather, ranging from familiar phrases to more old-fashioned or regional terms. The purple group, as usual the hardest of the four, hinged on multiple meanings of a single short word rather than a spelling trick, requiring players to think broadly about the many things that can be described as a "shell."

Today's Connections answers

With the hints out of the way, here is the complete solution to Sunday's puzzle:

The yellow group — developmental milestones — consisted of CRAWLING, FIRST WORDS, ROLLING OVER and SOLID FOOD.

The green group — outdated or nostalgic technology — consisted of BLACKBERRY, DISCMAN, DVD PLAYER and PLASMA TV.

The blue group — ways to describe rain — consisted of APRIL SHOWERS, LIQUID SUNSHINE, SCOTCH MIST and WET WEATHER.

The purple group — things that can be called a "shell" — consisted of CARAPACE, GAS STATION, PASTRY CRUST and ROWING BOAT. The connection ties together a tortoise's carapace, the Shell gas station brand, a pastry shell used in baking, and a rowing shell, the traditional term for a narrow racing boat.

A puzzle that rewarded pattern recognition

According to Forbes contributor Erik Kain, who tracks the puzzle's daily difficulty rating through the Connections Bot scoring system, Sunday's grid rated a 1 out of 5 on the difficulty scale, putting it among the easier puzzles the Times has published recently. Kain suggested solving the categories in the order yellow, green, blue and purple offered the smoothest path through the grid, noting the puzzle balanced simple verb-based groupings with trickier conceptual links that became clear only after ruling out the more obvious categories.

TechRadar's Johnny Dee, who also covered the puzzle, said several of the entries caught him off guard before he worked out the connection, particularly the "shell" theme tying together unrelated-looking words. Describing his early confusion over one of the trickier entries, Dee wrote, "I thought CARAPACE was an Ecuadorian cyclist," before realizing the word's more literal meaning as a hard protective shell. He also noted that "liquid sunshine" struck him as an unusual way to describe rainy weather, despite it being one of several regional or colloquial synonyms grouped in the blue category.

Strategy for future puzzles

Puzzle trackers who cover Connections daily generally recommend a similar approach: start by identifying the group that feels most obvious, since locking in a confident answer early reduces the number of remaining words to sort through. From there, players are encouraged to look for structural patterns, such as words that could belong to multiple categories, before committing to their final guesses. Purple groups in particular tend to reward players who look past a word's most literal or common meaning, since the Times frequently uses that slot for puzzles built around double meanings, wordplay or less obvious cultural references, as Sunday's "shell" theme demonstrated.

A companion puzzle, Connections: Sports Edition

Sunday also brought a new installment of Connections: Sports Edition, a spinoff of the main puzzle launched by the Times for sports-focused solvers. According to Parade, puzzle number 671 organized its four groups around Ohio-based sports organizations, terms associated with boats, identifiers tied to America's pastime — a common nickname for baseball — and hockey-related organizations. As with the standard Connections puzzle, the Sports Edition resets daily at midnight and uses the same yellow-green-blue-purple difficulty structure.

Part of a growing puzzle lineup

Connections has become one of several daily games the Times uses to drive its Games subscription business, alongside Wordle, Strands, the Mini Crossword and the newer Connections: Sports Edition. The core Connections puzzle debuted in 2023 and has since built a dedicated daily following, with solvers frequently sharing their results — without spoiling specific answers — using the game's colored emoji grid, a format that mirrors the viral sharing behavior that helped make Wordle a cultural phenomenon in the years prior.

Players who want to track their performance over time, or who missed today's puzzle and want to catch up, can access past Connections grids through a Times Games subscription, which also unlocks the full daily archive across the paper's other word and logic puzzles.

For now, Sunday's puzzle closes out as a comparatively easy one by recent standards, according to Forbes' difficulty tracking, giving players a smoother path to a completed grid heading into the new week.

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