NYT Connections hints and answers, Saturday Apr 12

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 Saturday, 12th April? If you're struggling with any of the groups in today's puzzle, we're here to assist. We've broken down today's Connections challenge into several easy-to-follow steps, to let you solve it at your own pace.

Read on for all the hints you'll ever need. And remember, as long as you can solve three Connections categories, the last one will sort itself out for you!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Saturday 12th April
• 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 Saturday 12th April

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: A brief period.
• Green: To make a mistake or slip up.
• Blue: Think of basketball.
• Purple: Used for the names of countries in the continent below Europe.
• Extra hint 1: Spur and Sun belong in the same group.
• Extra hint 2: Bots and Came belong in the same group.

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

• Yellow:Bit
• Green:Stray
• Blue:Sun
• Purple:Tan

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: Short Period Of Time
• Green: Do Wrong
• Blue: N.B.A. Player
• Purple: Starts Of African Countries

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 Saturday, 12th April:

• Yellow: Short Period Of Time (Bit, Flash, Jiff, Sec)
• Green: Do Wrong (Err, Fall, Sin, Stray)
• Blue: N.B.A. Player (Buck, Net, Spur, Sun)
• Purple: Starts Of African Countries (Bots, Came, Ken, Tan)

The Yellow and Green groups were both pretty easy for me today, but the Blue and Purple groups are tough. If you don't watch Basketball (like myself), it's not entirely natural to put words like "Spur" and "Sun" together, I'm afraid.

Looking at words like "Bots" and "Ken" and figuring out that both are shortened forms of "Botswana" and "Kenya" is also darn hard, in my opinion. Perhaps if you're an experienced traveler throughout Africa, it won't be so difficult, but it's still one of those obscure categories that Connections so often specialises in.

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!