NYT Connections today hints and answers — Thursday, June 19 (#739)

Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on June 19 for puzzle #739 are 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.

Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #738, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #739. 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.

Today's Connections words are: Final, Destination, Train, Stops, Blocks, Ball, Masks, Papers, Foils, Jacks, Jackets, Route, Attendance, Gloves, Starting point, and Homework.

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

• 🟨 Yellow: Components of one's grade
• 🟩 Green: Map app options
• 🟦 Blue: Classic toys
• 🟪 Purple: Fencing gear

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: Prep for a graded Epee tournament with travel plans and a few toys.

Today's Connections answers

So, what are today's Connections answers for game #739?

Drumroll, please...

• 🟨 Components of one's grade: Attendance, final, homework, papers
• 🟩 Map app options: Destination, route, starting point, stops
• 🟦 Classic toys: Ball, blocks, jacks, train
• 🟪 Fencing gear: Foils, gloves, jackets, masks

My first spot was jacks and blocks but I dismissed that category at first because a ball is part of playing jacks, and initially didn't think they would combine ball and jacks.

So, where I started the solve was with route, starting point, stops and destination, though my guess was a 5K race.

The next thing I had was foils, gloves, jackets and masks where I was thinking of fencing.

With the remaining eight, I finally accepted the ball and jacks combo and added blocks and train for classic toys.

And I wrapped it up with the yellow category of things that make up your grade: attendance, final, homework and papers.

Yesterday's Connections answers

• 🟨 Qualities of a rainy day: Cold, gray, wet, windy
• 🟩 Squarely: Dead, exactly, right, smack
• 🟦 Contents of a pod: Astronaut, coffee, pea, whale
• 🟪 Body parts plus a starting letter: Barm, lear, rankle, ship

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #738, which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

I got some crazy idea in my head the several words with the A change to an E with leer, deed, pee and I threw in berm. No clue, what I was doing to start the day.

I rectified that mistake with knocking the yellow out grabbing cold, gray, wet and windy for rainy days.

From there, I was looking at the grid and peas in a pod popped into my mind. That opened a connections in my mind with whale and then coffee. I'm not sure how I got to astronaut save it didn't seem to fit anywhere else.

The green category finally clicked from there. And I was able to group smack, right, exactly and dead.

I may have mentioned this before but I despise the purple groups that add or subtract a letter. That's a connection flaw on my part as I seem to have an inability to see it.

Anyway, fortunately, I ended the day with purple and its body parts: barm, lear, rankle, and ship.

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.