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ForbesTips and answers on “Connections” from today’s NYT for Monday, September 23From Kris Holt

Hello everyone! I hope your week has started well.

Today’s NYT Connections Clues and answers coming soon.

How to play connections

Connections is a free, popular New York Times daily word game. Every day at midnight you get a new puzzle. You can NYT Website or game app.

You are presented with a grid of 16 words. Your task is to sort these into four groups of four by finding the connections between them. The groups can be things like clickable items, names of participants in research studies, or words preceded by a body part.

Each puzzle has only one solution. You must be careful with words that could fit into more than one category. You can mix the words up to see if there are any connections between them.

Each group is color-coded. The yellow group is usually the easiest to understand, blue and green are in between, and the purple group is usually the most difficult. The purple group often includes wordplay.

Choose four words that you think go together and press submit. If you guess wrong, you lose a life. When you're close to getting a correct group, you may see a message letting you know that you're one word away from the correct group, but you still need to figure out which one to swap out.

If you make four mistakes, it's game over. Let's make sure that doesn't happen with some tips. And if you're really having trouble, today's Connections Answers. As with Wordle and other similar games, you can easily share the results with your friends on social media and group chats.

What are today's connection tips?

Scroll slowly! Immediately after the instructions for each of today’s Connections Groups, I will tell you which groups they are without immediately telling you which words belong in these groups.

Today's 16 words are…

• BALLOON
• BOOK
• MODEL
• BANNER
• NOVEL
• AMBASSADOR
• CONFETTI
• STREAMERS
• SECURE
• CREATIVE
• RESERVE
• FRESH
• ORIGINAL
• GARLAND
• Influencers
• CHARTER

And the clues for today’s groups are:

• Yellow group – inventive
• Green group – arrange in advance
• Blue group – festive decorations
• Purple Group – perhaps careers of the 21st century

What are today's Connections groups?

Need additional help?

Be warned: We are starting to Spoiler area.

Today's groups are …

• Yellow Group – inspired
• Green Group – Procure in advance
• Blue group – some party decoration
• Purple Group – Online Personality

What are today's Connections answers?

Warning, spoilers! Don’t scroll down until you’re ready to see today’s Connections Answer.

This is your final warning!

Today’s Connections Answers are …

• Yellow Group – inspired (CREATIVE, FRESH, NEW, ORIGINAL)
• Green Group – Procure in advance (BOOK, CHARTER, RESERVE, SECURE)
• Blue group – some party decoration (BALLOON, BANNER, CONFETTI, GARLAND)
• Purple Group – Online Personality (AMBASSADOR, INFLUENCER, MODEL, STREAMER)

There was no perfect game today, but for me it was two wins in a row. Here's how I did:

🟦🟨🟨🟨

🟨🟨🟨🟨

🟦🟦🟦🟪

🟩🟩🟩🟩

🟦🟦🟦🟦

🟪🟪🟪🟪

I made two very avoidable mistakes. I first guessed wrong about NOVEL, BANNER, FRESH and ORIGINAL and then saved the yellows when I realized BANNER didn't fit.

I made another mistake when I guessed BALLOON, CONFETTI, STREAMER and BANNER. This was stupid because I realized early on that STREAMER probably goes with INFLUECER.

Anyway, I changed direction to get the greens next. This group was followed by the blues and the purples, who brought the victory.

That's all for today Connections Hints and answers. Be sure to check out my blog for clues and the solution for Wednesday's game if you need them.

PS: A colleague and I were talking a bit about Nine Inch Nails, so here is one of my favorite songs by them: