Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on January 12 for puzzle #581 are substantially harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.8 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, #580, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #581. 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: Comets, Invention, Coin Toss, Defender, Court, Asteroids, Fairy Tale, Dress Coat, Fiction, Romance, Sonic the Hedgehog, Centipede, Charm, Fantasy, Breakout, Pursue
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Fabrication
- 🟩 Green: Woo
- 🟦 Blue: Classic Atari Games
- 🟪 Purple: Things featuring Tails
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: Reminisce about old flings, childhood games, and the tales we leave behind.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #581?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Fabrication: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Fiction, Invention
- 🟩 Woo: Charm, Court, Pursue, Romance
- 🟦 Classic Atari games: Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede, Defender
- 🟪 Things featuring tails: Coin Toss, Comets, Dress Coat, Sonic the Hedgehog
I grew up in the 64-bit era but snuck in some gaming sessions on my cousin's older systems whenever I could. Several video game titles jumped out at me after I saw Sonic the Hedgehog, but I struck out thinking they were all related. Once I looked a little closer, I realized only certain games shared the same console: Asteroids, Breakout, Centipede and Defender.
Next I struck out on another red herring trying to wrangle up all the bookstore genre sections I could find. When I was only one off, I realized Romance was the outlier and the yellow category finally hit me with Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Fiction, and Invention.
After that, I was on the hunt for where else Romance could fit when I spotted Court, Pursue, and Charm for the green category.
That left purple as today's rote fill, and it might be one of my favorite categories to date because Tails was my favorite character growing up, so I love to see the Connections Crew giving the lil dude a shout-out.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Display of rows and columns: Array, grid, matrix, table
- 🟩 Things to do at a work event: Circulate, converse, mingle, network
- 🟦 Olympic events since 2000: Breaking, surfing, taekwondo, trampoline
- 🟪 ____ Court: Food, Kangaroo, Supreme, Tennis
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #580, which had a difficulty rating of 2.6 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I kicked yesterday's puzzle off with a strike seeing taekwondo, trampoline, surfing and tennis and noting them as Olympic sports. One away. So I moved on.
So, we quickly knocked out yellow category having seen matrix, grid and table. Took a moment to find array but we got there.
I saw kangaroo and immediately thought, "Court." Looking for food court, supreme court and tennis court made sense to me.
Now, I returned to the Olympics and was able to see breaking, which only just became an Olympic sport at the 2024 Summer games.
Which left networking as my last one. We had circulate, converse, mingle and network.
