If you’re playing today’s NYT Connections, here’s a clean breakdown of the board plus light nudges before the full solution. If you want to attempt it first, you can play on the official site at nytimes.com/games/connections.

Today’s board (16 words)

  • CROSSWORD
  • AREA
  • AYES
  • ORCA
  • ARIA
  • ARS
  • OREO
  • EASE
  • VOLUME
  • DOMINO
  • ENCORE
  • LENGTH
  • EXCALIBUR
  • PERIMETER
  • OWES
  • LUXOR

Category hints (ordered from easier to trickier)

  • Yellow: Basic math you’d use to size or measure shapes.
  • Green: Things commonly described as black-and-white.
  • Blue: Names you’ll find on the Las Vegas Strip.
  • Purple: Words that sound like plural letters when spoken aloud.

One gentle nudge per group

  • Yellow: Think length, surface, edge length, and how much a shape can hold.
  • Green: Board games, marine mammals, sweets, and printed grids.
  • Blue: A sword, a pyramid, and two modern towers.
  • Purple: Say them out loud — you should hear Rs, Is, Es, and Os.

Full answers for Connections #834

  • Yellow — Basic geometric calculations: AREA, LENGTH, PERIMETER, VOLUME
  • Green — Black-and-white things: CROSSWORD, DOMINO, ORCA, OREO
  • Blue — Las Vegas casino hotels: ARIA, ENCORE, EXCALIBUR, LUXOR
  • Purple — Words that sound like plural letters: ARS (Rs), AYES (Is), EASE (Es), OWES (Os)
Image credit: New York Times

How to see these sets faster

Start with the concrete math terms; those typically cluster quickly (AREA, LENGTH, PERIMETER, VOLUME). From there, black-and-white items stand out across food (OREO), games (DOMINO), animals (ORCA), and print (CROSSWORD). The remaining proper nouns split cleanly once you spot the Las Vegas hotels (ARIA, ENCORE, EXCALIBUR, LUXOR), leaving the wordplay group that “sounds like” letters (ARS, AYES, EASE, OWES).

Note: homophones often anchor the hardest set. Reading those tiles out loud is a reliable way to surface the purple category when everything else feels solved by elimination.

If you’re new to Connections

  • There’s exactly one correct solution: four groups of four.
  • You get up to three mistakes; the fourth ends the game.
  • Colors roughly track difficulty: yellow (easiest), then blue/green, then purple (most wordplay-heavy).

That’s today’s grid, deconstructed. Come back tomorrow ready to test synonyms, scan for proper-noun clusters, and — when in doubt — say the tiles out loud.