Beginning this month, my colleague Paul Tassi and I are taking over the weekend desk for Connections guides from our colleague Kris Holt, who will still be handling weekday guides. I’m excited to expand my puzzling endeavors to this extra challenging, and sometimes incredibly frustrating, game.

I’ll also have to come up with a nickname for you Connections puzzle-solvers. I call my Wordle players Wordlers and my Strands players some version of Strandistarians or Strandistas (etc). Maybe Connectioneers will suffice (as in Musketeers) unless I come up with something better.

Today is May the 4th, which is Star Wars Day (because May the 4th be with you) and today’s Connections has some words that just might be from a galaxy far, far way. Let’s get right to it! You can skip the next section and jump right to today’s hints if you already know how to play.

How To Play Connections

Connections is the second-most popular NYT Games puzzle game outside of the main crossword itself, and an extremely fun, free offering that will get your brain moving every day. Play it right here.

The goal is to take a group of 16 words and find links between four pairs of four of them. They could be specific categories of terms, or they could be little world puzzles where words may come before or after them you need to figure out. And they get more complicated from there.

There is only one set of right answers for this, and you only get a certain number of tries so you can’t just spam around until you find something. There are difficulty tiers coded by color, which will usually go from yellow, blue/green to purple as difficulty increases, so know that going in and when you start linking them together.

You pick the four words you think are linked and either you will get a solve and a lit up row that shows you how you were connected. If you’re close, it will tell you that you’re one away. Again, four mistakes you lose, but if you want to know the answers without failing, either come here, or delete your web cookies and try again. If you want to play more puzzles, you can get an NYT Games subscription to access the full archives of all past puzzles.

What Are Today’s Connections Hints?

These are the hints that are laid out on the puzzle board itself, but after that, we will get into spoiler territory with some hints and eventually the answers.

Today’s Bonus Clue: You’ll notice some words that call to mind Star Wars in this grid (maybe calling to mind a Sith lord, a smuggler, a Wookiee and a bounty hunter). They are a trap. Do not lump them together!

Hints for the Connections groups today are:

• ?Blue group – What you’d use to make your favorite noodle shop beverage.
• ?Green group – Words that describe you playing music on a very specific stringed instrument.
• ?Purple group – You’ll need to swap first letters in this celestial group.
• ?Yellow group – This one is all about a specific food group that’s been poorly prepared and how you’d describe it to someone.

What Are Today’s Connections Groups?

Alright, the full spoilers follow here as we get into what the groups are today:

• ?Blue group– Ingredients in Bubble Tea
• ?Green group – Play some electric guitar
• ?Purple group – Planets/Dwarf planets with first letter changed
• ?Yellow group – Qualities of overcooked meat

What Are Today’s Connections Answers?

The full-on answers are below for each group, finally inserting the four words in each category. Spoilers follow if you do not want to get this far. The Connections answers are:

• ?Blue group – Boba, Milk, Sugar, Tea
• ?Green group – Jam, Noodle, Shred, Solo
• ?Purple group – Bluto, Cars, Darth, Genus
• ?Yellow group– Chewy, Dry, Stringy, Tough

I actually got this one pretty quickly today, mostly because I knew that the Star Wars words – DARTH, SOLO, BOBA and CHEWY – had to be a red herring. Once I spotted BOBA I just looked for other Boba Tea words and found SUGAR, MILK and TEA pretty quickly. That took care of those.

After this, I tried to think of words with multiple meanings. NOODLE has several different meanings and as soon as I imagined noodling on a guitar, I realized that SOLO would work . . . and JAM and SHRED. Sure enough, the guitar player in me figured this one out. The purples took a bit longer, but I basically just took four words that seemed a bit off, not really fitting in with anything else, and grouped those. DARTH, GENUS, CARS and BLUTO? I didn’t know how they fit together but I knew they were different from the rest of the words.

Sure enough, these were actually planets – Pluto, Mars, Earth and Venus – and this left me with only yellows. Not too shabby! According to Connections Bot, this was trickier than recent connections, at 4/5 Difficulty. Here’s the stats:

How did you do on today’s Connections? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.

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