If your brain is in need of a rest after a long week, Newsweek‘s helpful Connections hints are sure to secure you a win.
Connections tasks players with uncovering common threads among a series of words. The challenging brainteaser was released by The New York Times in June 2023 and has gone on to become the newspaper’s second-most-played game behind Wordle, another linguistics-based puzzle.
Instructions for how to play are listed below if you’re new to it or simply need a refresh. The clues and answers for #636 are toward the end of the article, so we advise you scroll carefully if you want to solve it yourself.
How to Play Connections
To start, a table of 16 words will appear on your screen that you must separate into four categories. Each of these four groups is color-coded to reflect its difficulty: yellow for the easiest, followed by green, then blue and then purple.
For example, in Friday’s game, the terms “Brown,” “Cash,” “Dylan” and “Mercury” were associated with: “Subjects of acclaimed musical biopics.” This was a green category.
The purple category, meanwhile, was a tricky one. It was titled, “Fruits with their second letters changed,” and the words linked to it were “ample,” “dote,” “lumon” and “poach.”
Wyna Liu, Connections developer and Times puzzle editor, told Newsweek last year she understands players can get “mad” with the game, but she offered up her best tips on how to tackle it.
“Wait as long as you can before guessing,” she said. “You may see the board and have completely identified the category, seeing five words that could belong in that category.”
She added: “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.”
Players only get four guesses before the answers will be revealed, and Liu said they “go by extremely quickly.”
Liubomyr Vorona/iStock / Getty Images Plus
Connections #636 Hints and Clues for Saturday, March 8
Below are Newsweek‘s tips to help you with Saturday’s game:
Yellow: Not real
Green: Seen on a washing machine
Blue: Terms associated with the Bill and Ted films
Purple: Words before “Box”
Connections #636 Answers for Saturday, March 8
Yellow Category: FAUX
Yellow Words: Artificial, Fake, Imitation, Mock
Green Category: WASHING MACHINE CYCLES/SETTINGS
Green Words: Bulky, Cotton, Delicate, Spin
Blue Category: WORDS SAID FREQUENTLY IN THE BILL AND TED MOVIES
Blue Words: Bogus, Dude, Excellent, Totally
Purple Category: ___ BOX
Purple Words: Chatter, Juke, Shadow, Soap
Congrats if you solved today’s Connections correctly! That being said, don’t stress if you didn’t. Luckily, you will get another chance on Sunday when a new game will be available for you to try.
Connections is released at midnight in your local time zone, so be sure to check back with Newsweek daily for more hints and answers.
For the time being, why not take a crack at these other popular word-based games?