Saturday’s edition of The New York Times’ popular word-grouping game sent players down several wrong paths before the puzzle’s trickiest category revealed itself, according to multiple outlets that cover the daily puzzle. Here’s a full breakdown of Connections #1112 for June 27, 2026, including hints for those still working through it and the complete answers for anyone ready to check their work.

What is Connections?

Launched in June 2023, Connections is one of The New York Times’ newest puzzle hits, ranking second only to Wordle in popularity among the paper’s daily games. Each day, players are presented with 16 words or short phrases that must be sorted into four groups of four, with each group sharing a hidden, often unexpected, link. The game is edited and constructed by Wyna Liu, the Times’ puzzle editor.

The categories are color-coded by difficulty, running from the most straightforward connections to the most abstract. Yellow typically represents the easiest grouping, followed by green, then blue, with purple reserved for the hardest category, which often involves wordplay, hidden words or cultural references designed to mislead players. According to the Times’ own guidance on solving the puzzle, successful players generally start with the simplest, most undeniable sets, consider alternate meanings of ambiguous words, and watch for patterns in suffixes or endings before committing to a guess. Players are allowed four mistakes total before the puzzle ends.

Today’s 16 words

Saturday’s grid presented players with the following 16 entries to sort: CATWALK, FOXTROT, CREDIT CARD, COLLECTION, BOARDWALK, DESIGNER, ENVELOPE, CROSSWALK, FIREWALK, INCOME TAX, BILLIARD BALL, MODEL, SHORT LINE, DECANTER, WATER WORKS and BARBER POLE.

One word-game outlet covering the puzzle described Saturday’s board as blending physical actions, clever rearrangements and nostalgic references, calling it both playful and slightly deceptive. A few words appeared to fit multiple themes at once, while the toughest category relied on players noticing a shared hidden word rather than any direct, surface-level meaning.

Hints for each category

For players who want a nudge before seeing the full answers, here are hints corresponding to each of the four groupings, presented from easiest to hardest.

The first category centers on something that appears during a major runway event, with the group revolving around the fashion industry more broadly.

The second category connects items that share a common visual pattern — think of objects defined by alternating bands of color running across or around them.

The third category will be familiar to anyone who has spent an afternoon around a game night staple, with the four entries representing specific spaces a player might land on during a long-running board game.

The fourth and hardest category hides its connection inside the words themselves. Horses provide the unifying link, with each entry containing a term associated with a specific, recognizable riding movement.

The answers, category by category

The first group, representing essential elements of a fashion show, consists of CATWALK, COLLECTION, DESIGNER and MODEL — the runway, the seasonal lineup of clothing presented on it, the person who creates that clothing, and the person who wears it down the catwalk itself.

The second group, built around objects featuring stripes, includes BILLIARD BALL, BARBER POLE, CREDIT CARD and ENVELOPE. While billiard balls and barber poles are more obviously associated with stripes, the inclusion of credit card, with its magnetic stripe, and envelope, a nod to the red-and-blue striped borders traditionally found on airmail envelopes, added a layer of misdirection that tripped up several solvers working through the puzzle.

The third group gathers specific spaces from the classic board game Monopoly: BOARDWALK, INCOME TAX, SHORT LINE and WATER WORKS. One puzzle columnist covering the solve specifically noted that this category proved especially difficult for international players, since editions of Monopoly sold outside the United States often use different property and space names than the American version, making the connection less immediately obvious for solvers in other countries.

The fourth and most difficult group, the purple category, hides a horse-related term inside each entry: FOXTROT, DECANTER, CROSSWALK and FIREWALK. The foxtrot conceals “trot,” decanter conceals “canter,” and both crosswalk and firewalk conceal “walk” — three distinct gaits a horse can move through, tucked inside otherwise unrelated words.

Why this puzzle tripped up so many solvers

Several puzzle writers covering Saturday’s edition acknowledged getting misdirected by the overlap between categories. One columnist described initially recognizing the hidden link between decanter and the horse-gait theme, but struggling to commit to that grouping because four separate words in the grid — catwalk, boardwalk, crosswalk and firewalk — all happened to end in the letters “walk,” making it unclear at first which ones belonged together and which were simply decoys placed by the puzzle’s editor to create uncertainty.

That same writer noted ultimately connecting the striped-objects group and the fashion-show group with relative confidence, but being left to guess between the two remaining “walk” words for the final, hardest category, and picking the wrong one on the first attempt before correcting course.

A new Connections puzzle appears at midnight local time for each player’s time zone, meaning some solvers are always working through a different day’s grid than others depending on where they’re located. Players looking to brush up on strategy before tackling future puzzles are generally advised to begin by scanning for tight, unambiguous categories such as colors, numbers or straightforward object groupings, save the purple category for last, and stay alert for words that seem to belong to more than one theme at once — a hallmark of Liu’s puzzle construction that frequently rewards patience over quick instinct.

For those who came up short on Saturday’s puzzle, the broader archive of past Connections puzzles remains available for additional practice, alongside the paper’s other daily word games, including Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword, each of which resets on its own midnight schedule and offers its own daily test of vocabulary and lateral thinking.