NYT ‘Connections’ hints June 9: answers and clues for game #364

In just three days, Connections will be turning one years old and in that short space of time has become a global hit.

Wyna Liu helped develop the game for The New York Times and it has become its second-most-played game after Wordle.

Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and the answers for Sunday’s puzzle are toward the end of the article.

How To Play ‘Connections’

The brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, one game this week linked the words “clear,” “earn,” “make” and “net,” which all came under the category “take home, as income.”

Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and purple. However, the puzzles are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep things interesting.

The uniting themes can come from a broad range of categories—anything from Halloween costumes to geometric terms.

If all four words are correctly placed into each set, those words will be removed from the board. Each incorrect guess counts toward the mistake tally. Up to four errors can be made before it’s game over.

Players can shuffle and rearrange the board if they want to try to make the process of guessing the connections easier.

To make things a bit tougher for players, a word can sometimes belong to more than one category—but there is only one correct answer.

Liu spoke about developing the game for and how she sought to make it difficult, but not so much it would turn players off.

“There would have to be a mix of categories for the game to feel challenging and satisfying,” she said in the NYT. “Some categories might be defined by their use of wordplay—palindromes, homophones, adding or dropping letters and words—rather than the literal meanings of the words on the cards.”

She also shared some advice on how to tackle finding words that fit in multiple categories.

“One suggestion that may help save some guesses is if you start selecting cards and notice that there are five or more that belong to that category, try pivoting to a different category before making that first guess,” she said. “Doing so might take one of those extra cards out of contention, or at least remove a few cards from the board, making other categories easier to see.”

‘Connections’ #369 Clues for Sunday, June 9

Newsweek has some hints to help you figure out today’s Connections categories.

Yellow: All the emotions

Green: Toss about

Blue: Layered up

Purple: Spud-tastic

‘Connections’ #369 Answers for Sunday, June 9

Yellow: Feeling Some Type of Way

SALTY, BITTER, SORE, UPSET

Green: Throw Here and There

PEPPER, SCATTER, SPRINKLE, STREW

Blue: Things With Layers

CAKE, EARTH, ONION PLYWOOD

Purple: ___ Potato

BAKED, COUCH, HOT, SWEET