Today’s NYT Connections feels like a bit of a genre remix: you’ve got fishing terms, a “lots” style word set, basketball-rule vocabulary, and a final group that’s basically what happens when you stare at your remote and press every button. Even if one category makes you pause, the puzzle is very solvable once you lock into each theme.
If you want puzzle-solving help after you play, you can also use the Connections bot scoring to sanity-check your results and see how the groups shake out.
Hints
Yellow (easiest): Think of the stuff you’d reel in to land a fish—everything from the bait setup to what you use to bring the catch up.
Green: A straightforward “there are many” idea—words that mean a large number or a big collection of people/things.
Blue: This one points to a specific kind of basketball mistake—an infraction that’s tied to specific rule-breaking wording.
Purple (tough): Controlled with up/down buttons. If you’ve ever worked a remote, you’ve already been practicing this category all your life.
Answers
Yellow — Fishing gear: fly, hook, line, net.
Green — Multitude: drove, host, mass, pack.
Blue — Commit a basketball infraction: carry, double-dribble, goaltend, travel.
Purple — Controlled with up/down buttons: car window, channel, elevator, volume.
One small tip for speeding things up: when a theme feels “obvious but slippery” (like the remote-control group), treat it as an action/constraint problem rather than a pure vocabulary one—ask what can be adjusted up and down, then test each candidate. Today’s purple set falls neatly into that mindset.
