July is here and we’re all still enjoying a lovely 4th Of July weekend. We hosted a really lovely barbecue with friends that was just delightful. It ended up being an ad hoc multi-course meal, with various appetizers and grilled items coming out at various points. Nobody left hungry, that’s for sure. I think my favorite was a green chili hashbrown casserole that one friend brought. The hand-stuffed bratwursts were pretty dang good also. In any case, the memory of food and fun lingers still, but now we have a Connections to solve. Let’s group some words, shall we?

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.