Today’s Connections Hints & Answers For July 6, 2024 (Puzzle #390)

Even the Connections categories today seem to have a connection in today’s puzzle, which can make it challenging but also makes it quite interesting. There are several times when it feels like the game’s editor is trying to trick us, but this one does not feel like that so much as it feels like these categories are building upon themselves. It makes for a nice themed puzzle, if only vaguely.

If you like this kind of challenging puzzle, you might also like the NYT’s Tiles puzzle. The Tiles puzzle requires you to make symbolic connections, looking at how each tile is similar to others around it. The more connections you make successfully, the longer your streak and the better your score.

Today’s Connections Category Hints

JULY 6 #390

The Connections puzzle has four categories, and in this case, many of them form the building blocks of their categories. All but the last have to do with quite simple things, the most basic forms of their categories. This makes it themed at least enough to make us happy – or frustrated.

Today’s Connections Answers

JULY 6 #390

Yellow Answers: Revealed & Explained

The most basic of the building blocks, the ATOM, CELL, and MOLECULE are all quite well-publicized and in most school textbooks as the smallest parts of humans and animals and plants alike. PROTEIN was a little less immediately obvious, but as it is a part of a cell it was quickly added in.

Green Answers: Revealed & Explained

Both the building blocks of childhood and the building block of human life, these words all have to do with baby items. While MOBILE looks suspiciously like it might go with PHONE and CELL, there is no fourth word to put together. Instead, it is a different type of MOBILE, one that babies can actually use along with their RATTLE.

Blue Answers: Revealed & Explained

This category could be seen as the building blocks of music, the most basic instruments you can use to play music as a child. The SPOONS did mess with us at first, as we had toy spoons as a kid, but once that was ruled out and looking at the other four words, this grouping made the most sense. A SAW and WASHBOARD do sound ominous together, but in this context it is a little less so.

Purple Answers: Revealed & Explained

This category is not as themed into the building blocks of something as the others were. DOG is perhaps the most obvious answer to go with TAG, along with PRICE. It was sadly difficult to recall that FREEZE tag was a fun game to play, and we had not heard it called PHONE tag for a long time. Luckily, as the last category left it was also the easiest to solve at that point.

Other Games Like Connections

Once you have finished thinking about the nostalgic connotations of freeze tag and banging jugs on the floor to make music, you can play a different game in the table below: