Ready to guess today?
Good.
The June 24 Connections puzzle (No. 1109) is a bit of a mixed bag. If you are a music nerd, you’re going to crush the first category. Same if you have a soft spot for primary-colored fiction. It’s lively stuff. Not too messy, except for that purple group, which always tends to feel like a trap.
Check here for the answers and hints for today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle Connections, Sports Edition, and Strands too. Because one brain puzzle never really satisfies the urge to feel smarter.
There’s a Connections bot now, just like the one for Wordle
Run it after you finish. You’ll get a number score plus some analysis. If you’re logged into Times Games, you can track stats like win rates, streaks, and perfect games. It feeds the competitive vein in a way that is both charming and slightly obsessive.
Play well or don’t play at all
Here’s how today’s groups shake out, ranked from the easy yellow to the dreaded purple.
Yellow: Prog Bands
Rock on, literally
Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and Rush made the cut. Simple enough for anyone who knows that Pink Floyd isn’t just a color scheme.
Green: Wedding Gifts
Here comes the bride
The old reliable registry staples
China, luggage, money, and a toaster. You don’t always need a knife set to be happy.
Blue: Red Characters
Elmo wasn’t invited to the party
Clifford, Deadpool, Kool-Aid man, and Mr. Krabs round this group. All of them are very, very red. Do they share a studio? No, that’s not it. Just the hue.
Purple: Rhyming Compounds
Boob tube slang fits here too, maybe?
Chick flick, helter skelter. Humpty Dumpty, mumbo jumbo.
It’s about the sound structure
These are the words that stick in your head because they rhyme with themselves. Bizarre? Sure. But accurate.
The end result isn’t a tight package of logic, just wordplay
And that’s usually how the hardest puzzles land
Looking back, the top five toughest Connections ever involved concepts like “things that run” or “power [blank]”.
This one sits somewhere in the middle, right now
Maybe it’ll move up the list
Or maybe not
