Tips and answers on today's NYT's “Connections” for Friday, September 13

Are you looking for tips and answers for Thursday's “Connections” instead? You can find them here:

ForbesTips and answers on today's NYT's “Connections” for Thursday, September 12From Kris Holt

Hey everyone! Happy Friday the 13th! I hope you're watching a horror movie tonight if you're into that sort of thing. I haven't seen one in a while so I should catch up.

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, a message may appear letting you know that you're one word away from getting it right, 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…

• BEETLE
• JUICE
• ENERGY
• LEVEL
• COW
• PEP
• FOCUS
• BEANS
• ZIPPER
• JACK
• LIFE
• PRINCIPLE
• GIANT
• VOLT
• CIVIL
• REFER

And the clues for today’s groups are:

• Yellow Group – vim
• Green Group – equal in both directions
• Blue Group – Elements of a classic fairy tale
• Purple Group – Item referenced in the allusive opening track of the Beatles album. Rubber core

What are today's Connections groups?

Need additional help?

Be warned: We are starting to Spoiler territory.

Today's groups are …

• Yellow Group – Vitality
• Green Group – Palindromes with “E”
• Blue Group – seen in Jack and the Beanstalk
• Purple Group – Car Models

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 – Vitality (ENERGY, JUICE, LIFE, ZIP)
• Green Group – Palindromes with “E” (LEVEL, PEP, REFER, TENET)
• Blue group – known from Jack and the Beanstalk (BEANS, COW, GIANT, JACK)
• Purple group – car models (BEETLE, CIVIC, FOCUS, VOLT)

I was able to continue my winning streak with six wins in a row, but only just!

I immediately realized that it was a group of palindromes, but my first two guesses were both just one word away from being a group. PEP, TENET, CIVIC, and REFER weren't quite right, and replacing PEP with LEVEL didn't work either. Rather than trying to brute force the solution, it was time to change strategy.

When I saw COW, JACK and GIANT in a small cluster, I could see the blue ones. But ZIP, ENERGY, FOCUS and PEP were completely out of place, especially considering that PEP was logically one of the palindromes. Luckily, I made the connection between BEETLE and VOLT, which gave me the purple ones. The green ones were next, as CIVIC was eliminated, leaving the yellow ones as the winners.

That's all for today Connections Hints and answers. If you need hints and the solution for Saturday's game, be sure to check out my blog.

PS: I can't leave out Chappell Roan's performance at the Video Music Awards. “Good Luck Babe” isn't my favorite song of hers, but she rocked her performance. The staging and choreography were top notch. I enjoyed everything about it immensely, right down to the final scene with the fans' hands outstretched.