NYT Connections today hints and answers — Saturday, September 14 (#461)

Looking for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on September 14 for puzzle #461 get a tad easier than yesterday’s answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 3.4 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today’s answers. And if the hints aren’t enough, you’ll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we’re including a reflection on yesterday’s puzzle, #460, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #461. Only read on if you want to know today’s Connections answers.  

Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.

Today’s Connections answer — hints to help you solve it

Unlike our guide to today’s Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category’s difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you’ve made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

• 🟨 Yellow: Wine bottle info
• 🟩 Green: Console inputs
• 🟦 Blue: Prefixes
• 🟪 Purple: ____ King

These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today’s Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.

Here’s a larger hint:  It’s the weekend, relax with a glass of wine while wishing cars came with buttons, not touchscreens. Ask yourself who is king before filling in the beginnings.

Today’s Connections answers

So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #461?

Drumroll, please…

• 🟨 Wine bottle info: Grape, region, vintage, winery
• 🟩 Console inputs: Button, knob, slider, switch
• 🟦 Prefixes: Pro, retro, sub, super
• 🟪 _____ King: Burger, California, lion, prom

We went down the line today. 

So, we started with yellow grabbing grape, winery, region and vintage. I took a strike because I threw California in first, but that’s regional.

I went down a console path of super, pro, switch and retro which got a strike, and with hindsight was very wrong and a stretch on my part. It did lead me to seeing the green category with button, knob, slider and switch for console inputs.

Connections will tell you if you’re close to a category and a reconsideration of pro, super and retro got me to see sub as prefixes to words.

Which made purple’s Burger King, California King, Lion King and Prom King the easy fill. It’s a fun category. 

Yesterday’s Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #460, which had a difficulty rating of 3.7 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

It always feels surprising when you get the harder categories early because they feel obvious versus the supposed “easier” categories. 

I started today with the blue category having seen beans and cow, that led me to Jack and then giant for story bits from Jack and the Beanstalk. I think this could easily be a yellow or green category.

I was trying to put the yellow category together with Volt when I saw Civic. It clicked from there and Beetle jumped out immediately. I forgot about the Ford Focus but was able to pop that one in for the purple category.

The yellow category was so full of traps that I was legitimately surprised it’s considered the easiest one. Trust me, if I hadn’t already gotten rid of Volt I would have taken strikes trying to make it fit with energy, juice, life and zip. As it is, I took strikes trying to make Pep work. 

I was so caught up in putting the yellow group together that I never saw the green category. The yellow was so obvious that it was frustrating when I took strikes with the wrong words. 

The palindrome as a category is cool with level, pep, refer and tenet. 

The difficulty of this level actually comes from how tricky the yellow category is from jump with six possible words available to fit the group. Should the yellow category be the trickiest one if it’s also the easiest? I’m not against it, but again, for me, it’s weird when I knock out the alleged “harder” groupings early because the “easy” ones aren’t coming together.