Club Benefits
Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on April 12 for puzzle #1,036 are a bit easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Article continues belowToday'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.
Today's Connections words are:
- Fly
- Paper
- Take
- Cast
- Troll
- Project
- Angle
- Shed
- Position
- Russian
- Cuff
- Rag
- Radiate
- Stance
- Belt Loop
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Pants features
- 🟩 Green: Perspective
- 🟦 Blue: Emit
- 🟪 Purple: ___ dog
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: Structural swims benefit car tools.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #1,036?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Pants features: Belt loop, cuff, fly, pocket
- 🟩 Perspective: Angle, position, stance, take
- 🟦 Emit: Cast, project, radiate, shed
- 🟪 ___ doll: Paper, rag, russian, troll
Belt loop stuck out to me first today because it's two words and what else can it be but what you find on a pair of pants? I went looking for other clues that shared that theme, picking up cuff, fly, and pocket.
Then I spotted a quartet of synonyms for green with angle, position, stance, and take.
Russian was the other clue that really stood out, but with no other country-related words I started brainstorming what else it could refer to. Russian nesting dolls came to mind, and that line of thinking would get rid of troll, another clue that stuck out like a sore thumb. Rag and paper rounded out the rest of purple.
That left blue as today's rote fill with cast, project, radiate, and shed.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Found in the trunk of a car: Ice scraper, jack, jumper cables, spare tire
- 🟩 Benefactor: Angel, champion, patron, sponsor
- 🟦 Structural supports: Beam, brace, column, strut
- 🟪 Ending in bodies of water: Bombay, chelsea, screwdriver, snowflake
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1034, which had a difficulty rating of 2.5 out of 5.
I honestly nabbed beam, brace, column and strut because I saw it first and was genuinely surprised when it was the blue set.
To be fair, I thought angel, champion, patron, and sponsor were a bit harder even though I clocked that set next, in the normal green spot, so perhaps they were right.
Anyway, I never saw the bodies of water set so I threw in the car accessories next instead with spare tire, jumper cables, jack and ice scraper.
Which left bombay, chelsea, screwdriver, and snowflake as bodies of water for my final four.
Connections tips — how to win at Connections
There are two ways to play Connections, get the answers as you solve them or solve for the hardest group, Purple, first.
For either playstyle, the best tip I can give is to not be afraid of the shuffle button, especially if you’ve solved a set but you’re certain it isn’t the Purple group. You can shuffle the grid until your solved quartet is in a somewhat staked off area.
For the purple group, you can expect to see a handful of category types: words missing a letter, homophones, words with specific suffixes or prefixes, and [blank] word (or word [blank]). There are others, but this is a majority of what you’ll see. It can help to look for purple connections through one of those lenses.
If you’re not hunting for purple specifically, then the best advice I have is to look for smaller connections. For example, Riddler and Joker are Batman villains. Once you’ve grouped that duo together it’s easier to find another set.
Finally, watch out for traps. Occasionally, the Connections makers like to throw in a set of words that should seem very obvious to most people. But picking them can give you a strike, something you want to save for when you aren’t really sure between a couple of clues.
The tricky bit is that sometimes the very obvious foursome is actually one of the answers (usually the yellow or green levels).
One way to work around this is to note the four clues you think are an obvious set. Highlight them by selecting the words but don’t hit submit. From there take a second look around the grid to see if anything else stands out to you.
Often these super obvious sets are actually individually spread out between the four groups. So, if you see Wick, Neo, Ted and Mnemonic, you might immediately think of Keanu Reeves movies, but it's a trick. Instead, use the individual words as launching points to discover other connections.
If you're new to the game you should also take a look at our How to play Connections guide.
Got some thoughts about today's puzzle you want to share? Email us at scott.younker@futurenet.com or alyse.stanley@futurenet.com to get in touch.
