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Megan Cartwright is Newsweek’s Deputy Entertainment Editor, based in London, U.K. Her focus is on U.S. pop culture and entertainment news stories. Megan joined Newsweek in 2022 from New York where she was the Senior Editor for In Touch, Life & Style and Closer magazines and had previously interned at MTV, Cosmopolitan and InStyle. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University. Languages: English.
You can get in touch with Megan by emailing m.cartwright@newsweek.com.
Megan Cartwright
Deputy Entertainment Editor
Happy Saturday, puzzle fanatics! If your brain is fried after a long week and you’re in need of some assistance with today’s Connections game, Newsweek has your back.
The popular brainteaser was launched by The New York Times in June 2023 and has gone on to become the publication’s second-most played game behind Wordle, another word-based puzzle.
“The response has been really incredible and overwhelming, and unexpected,” Wyna Liu, a puzzle editor at NYT who creates the Connections games, said in an interview with Newsweek. “It’s exciting that something I care very deeply about is resonating with people.”
Keep scrolling for Newsweek‘s best hints to crack today’s game. The answers to #643 will also be revealed at the bottom of this article.
How To Play ‘Connections’
Connections tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association.
Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and purple. That being said, the puzzles are rarely straightforward and often use homophones, wordplay and other techniques to challenge players.
For example, Friday’s game linked the words “candy,” “ChapStick,” charging cable” and “magazine” under the category, “Checkout-line impulse buys.” This was a green category.
Meanwhile, the blue category was “Movies of various lengths” and included the terms: “epic,” “feature,” “film series” and “short.”
“The game has evolved with the solvers, and responds to solvers’ experience and expectations,” Liu told Newsweek readers, adding that her “best advice” is to “wait as long as you can before guessing” and avoid “rage solving.”
You’ll be pleased to hear there is no time limit to the game, so you’re free to ponder the answers all day long if you’d like.
‘Connections’ #643 Hints and Clues for Saturday, March 15
Below are Newsweek‘s best hints to help you with Saturday’s game:
Yellow: Sharp things
Green: Musically related
Blue: Legal terms
Purple: Associated with a nursery rhyme
In this stock image, a man wearing a coral shirt against a blue background smiles while looking at his cell phone.
vitalii lysak/iStock / Getty Images Plus
Yellow Category: SHARP PROTRUSION
Yellow Words: Barb,