NYT Connections hints and answers, Monday Mar 3

This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today's? Check out the Connections hint for Sunday 27th April!

Need a hint for today's Connections on Monday, 3rd March? Some days, the NYT Connections puzzles crank up the difficulty to a downright diabolical level. If this is one of those days, don't stress it, you aren't defeated just yet!

If today's theme-finder has you confused, we'll conjure up some clues in this Connections guide. Find our best hints and tips below!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Monday 3rd March
• What are today's Connections groups?
• What are today's Connections answers?

Here are the 16 Connections words for today:

How to play Connections

Connections is one of the most popular (and challenging) daily puzzle games published by the New York Times (owners of Wordle). The aim of Connections is to group the 16 words of the day into four groups, where each group of four words has a common theme.

For instance, the words "Hook", "Nana", "Peter", and "Wendy" are all Peter Pan characters. Or to take another example, "Action", "Ballpark", "Go", and "Stick" are all words which commonly come just before the word "Figure".

Your job is to figure out what these themes are that connect the various words together - but be wary, because a lot of the time there are deceptive red herring connections placed purely to throw you off! To win the game, you have to find all four Connections without making 4 mistakes. On your fourth mistake, the game is over and the answer is revealed automatically.

Each of the four groups in each day's Connections puzzle is also assigned a different colour, which represents how easy or difficult the Connection is to find. These colours are: Yellow (Easiest), Green (Easy), Blue (Medium), and Purple (Hardest).

Click here to play today's Connections puzzle!

Connections hint for Monday 3rd March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: After a hard day's work, what do most of us like to do?
• Green: It's shiny, yellow, valuable, and it appears in the following forms: [...]
• Blue: This group focuses on shape.
• Purple: This one is about a famous cartoon series.
• Extra hint 1: Three groups contain a word starting with 'B', and three groups contain a word starting with 'R'.
• Extra hint 2: The series from the purple group hails from the 1960s.

If you need a bit more help, tap the spoiler text below to reveal one word belonging to each group:

• Yellow:Chill
• Green:Coin
• Blue:Bolt
• Purple:Rubble

Spoiler warning! Today's Connections groups are revealed just below!

What are today's Connections groups?

If you need an even bigger clue to figure out today's Connections puzzle, below we'll reveal the four correct Connections groups - the themes which link together each set of four words in the Connections grid.

Here are the Connections groups for today:

• Yellow: Be At Leisure
• Green: Formats Of Gold
• Blue: Cylinder Of Material
• Purple: Seen In “The Flintstones”

Now that you know the themes for the various different Connections in today's puzzle, see if you can solve it! If not, check below for the full answer.

Spoiler warning! Today's Connections answer lies ahead!

What is today's Connections answer?

Here is the answer to today's Connections puzzle on Monday, 3rd March:

• Yellow: Be At Leisure (Chill, Loaf, Lounge, Rest)
• Green: Formats Of Gold (Bar, Coin, Leaf, Nugget)
• Blue: Cylinder Of Material (Bolt, Reel, Roll, Scroll)
• Purple: Seen In “The Flintstones” (Bone, Club, Dinosaur, Rubble)

I used to watch 'The Flintstones' as a child - good times, but it didn't help me with today's purple group. When I saw 'bone', 'club', and 'dinosaur', I suspected some prehistoric/cavemen theme (I kept thinking of survival game Ark, where you run around in a dinosaur world wearing bone armour and wielding a club), but I couldn't find the fourth member and thus erroneously concluded that I must be off.

Luckily the yellow group offered some respite, after which I needed just a minute to match 'coin' and 'nugget' and notice the 'gold' theme in the green group. I got stuck on blue and purple for while after that as I kept searching for connections based on meaning rather than the objects' appearance. All eight words seemed so unconnected that I was sure they were all related to some TV show I didn't know...

But I always like to consider every 'type' of Connections group before giving up, so when I eventually tried to see a connection based on shape, 'roll' and 'scroll' stood out. I then realised that I'd been thinking of a lightning bolt rather than a metal bolt, leading to the completion of the blue theme. Good thing I didn't have to involve any Flintstones after all - even though I came so close with the 'prehistoric' theme!

Congratulations if you got today's Connections answer right, with or without the help of our handy hints above! And if you didn't succeed today, don't worry - a new Connections puzzle is released every day at midnight, so you can try again tomorrow, just like with Wordle!