NYT Connections hints and answers, Thursday Mar 13

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 Thursday, 13th March? If one or two particularly elusive Connections themes are giving you a hard time, let us boost you chances of victory with a hint or two.

There's no need to just give up on a difficult puzzle. In fact, using some hints to find the solution may help you get better at Connections riddles and thus make it easier to find the answer by yourself next time. Let's tackle today's theme-guesser together!

In this guide:

• How to play Connections
• Connections hint for Thursday 13th 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 Thursday 13th March

Here are your Connections hints for today:

• Yellow: If you favour something, these words might be applicable.
• Green: These words will help you give a signal.
• Blue: Think of a game similar to poker.
• Purple: Pretend to be a sixteenth century English playwright.
• Extra hint 1: Each group contains two words starting with the same letter, except blue.
• Extra hint 2: 'Spin' and 'turn' belong to different groups.

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

• Yellow:Slant
• Green:Hail
• Blue:Flop
• Purple:Wilt

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: Partiality
• Green: Signal Down, As A Taxi
• Blue: Cards In Texas Hold ’Em
• Purple: Shakespearean Words

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 Thursday, 13th March:

• Yellow: Partiality (Angle, Bias, Slant, Spin)
• Green: Signal Down, As A Taxi (Flag, Hail, Wave, Whistle)
• Blue: Cards In Texas Hold ’Em (Flop, Hole, River, Turn)
• Purple: Shakespearean Words (Anon, Art, Thou, Wilt)

Today's yellow theme was a bit harder than usual for me because other than the word 'bias', I wouldn't immediately associate these words with partiality. 'Angle' made me think of an 'approach' at first, while 'slant' and 'spin' made me think of a direction (slope, movement) initially. I then realised the similarity between 'spin' and 'angle' as they both allow you to approach something in a different way, which may of course lead to 'bias'. A bit later than usual, I caught my first Connections theme of the day.

Next up was green, which clearly showed a connection based on 'signal' to me - I just didn't see the 'taxi' part yet. I matched whistle, wave, and flag fairly easily, but it took me a while to add 'hail' to today's green gang. I already got a hint of Shakespeare in the words 'art' and 'thou' before finalising the green group.

That's not to say I caught on to the 'Shakespeare' thing though; I just noticed some old-fashioned words (which, by the way, are 'Early Modern English' - not Old English, as is sometimes mistakingly assumed). I'd say that 'art, thou, and wilt' are the easiest to pick up on, but 'anon' is tricky because it's probably lesser known, and it's more commonly known as a shortening for 'anonymous' these days. I had to think about it for a while, and even then, I wasn't 100% sure if I remembered the older meaning of 'anon' correctly.

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!