NYT Connections today hints and answers — Tuesday, September 24 (#471)

Looking for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on September 24 for puzzle #471 are a bit easier than yesterday’s answers, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 3 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, #470, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #471. 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: Inspired
• 🟩 Green: Procure in advance
• 🟦 Blue: Bit of party decoration
• 🟪 Purple: Online personality

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:  Get your party decor up while ignoring your Instagram feed before finding something new and reserving the entertainment.

Today’s Connections answers

So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #471?

Drumroll, please…

• 🟨 Inspired: Creative, fresh, novel, original
• 🟩 Procure in advance: Book, charter, reserve, secure
• 🟦 Bit of party decoration: Balloon, banner, confetti, garland
• 🟪 Online personality: Ambassador, influencer, model, streamer

I found myself with one quibble on this one. 

I got started with the blue category when I saw balloon, banner, confetti and garland.  An early strike got me when I had streamer over garland. That strike made me pause, but I came back and swapped in garland since the the other three didn’t fit elsewhere.

Streamer led me to the purple category where I added influencer, model and ambassador. Despite the word combo ‘brand ambassador’ existing, I quibble with ambassador in this list especially since it’s functionally the same word as influencer and isn’t an online personality in the same way. Model and streamer, people who can be influencers, are at least different. If you want to be tricky, I would have gone with something like poster or host, which could be reasonably placed elsewhere.

From there, I saw the green category with book, charter, reserve and secure. The simplest one so far.

Yellow was my last category. Creative, fresh, novel and original made sense. I saw those words, but don’t know why I didn’t connect them until the end here. I guess it’s inspired, sure.

Yesterday’s Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #470, which had a difficulty rating of 3.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

Alyse breezed through the yellow category today first, which always means the heat is on to figure out the remaining more difficult categories. But unlike the clues for the the rest, yellow’s answers today — Bumpy, Rough, Rugged, Uneven — were pretty straightforward. 

She stumbled a lot with the remaining categories because each one was packed with words with at least two or more meanings. Next came green with Bed, Parcel, Patch, and Plot, though by that point she’d already struck out once trying to connect Rocky and Scratchy with Patch. 

After that was the purple category. Parallel was the clear outlier for her, and Alyse worked backward from there to realize that it along with South, Amusement, and National all had to deal with types of parks. 

Last was the blue category with Chip, Rocky, Scratchy, and Stitch. She recognized all but Scratchy as she was never much of a “Simpsons” fan.