Hints and Answers for September 27, 2026 as Puzzle 1204 Gets Sneakily Deceptive

Puzzle number 1,204 of The New York Times’ Connections game closed out the weekend Sunday with a grid mixing sculpture materials, restaurant seating options, telecom vocabulary and a wordplay category built around the endings of Chinese dynasty names, a combination puzzle guides described as playful but carrying more hidden traps than it first appeared.

Connections presents players with 16 words that must be sorted into four hidden groups of four, with each group sharing a common category. The puzzle rates each group’s difficulty using a color system: yellow for the most straightforward connection, green for slightly trickier, blue for more difficult, and purple, typically the most wordplay-heavy or misleading group, as the hardest.

For those still working through Sunday’s puzzle, here are hints for each category, organized loosely from easiest to hardest, without giving away the specific words involved.

One category groups together materials commonly used to create sculptures, the kind of vocabulary an art student or gallery visitor would recognize immediately. A second category brings together different types of seating options a host or server might offer at a restaurant, ranging from a communal booth to a simple stool. A third category groups together words associated with telecommunications, the kind of terminology used to describe a phone service provider or wireless network. The fourth and trickiest category takes ordinary-looking words and phrases and reveals a hidden connection at the end of each one, tied to the names of historical Chinese dynasties.

SPOILER WARNING: The full solution to Sunday’s Connections puzzle follows below. Stop reading now if you’d rather work through the categories on your own.

Sunday’s puzzle resolved into the following four groups. The yellow category, Sculpture Media, consisted of BRONZE, CLAY, MARBLE and PLASTER, four materials commonly used by sculptors to create three-dimensional artwork. The green category, Restaurant Seating Options, grouped BANQUETTE, BOOTH, CHAIR and STOOL, four types of seating a diner might encounter at a restaurant. The blue category, Telecom, brought together CARRIER, NETWORK, OPERATOR and PROVIDER, four terms associated with telecommunications and phone or internet service. The purple category, Ending in Chinese Dynasties, consisted of BBQING, HOMING, LOHAN and WU-TANG, four words and names that each conceal the name of a historical Chinese dynasty at their end, including the Qing, Ming, Han and Tang dynasties.

Puzzle guides covering Sunday’s grid described it as deceptively gentle at first glance, with one reviewer noting there were surprisingly few obvious red herrings planted among the 16 words, a departure from the misdirection Connections puzzles often build into their harder categories. That same reviewer admitted to briefly wondering whether actor Lindsay Lohan had any thematic connection to the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan before recognizing the actual hidden-dynasty wordplay linking the two names together in the purple category. Forbes contributor Erik Kain rated Sunday’s puzzle a 1 out of 5 on the Connections Bot difficulty scale, one of the easier ratings a puzzle can receive, even while acknowledging the purple category’s wordplay took him a moment longer to piece together than the other three groups.

Connections has grown into one of the Times’ most consistently played daily puzzles since its official launch in 2023, expanding the newspaper’s games portfolio well beyond its traditional crossword offerings. Puzzle guides recommend a general strategy of scanning the full grid first for any words that seem to share an obvious connection, then working through the remaining words methodically to identify less immediately apparent categories, an approach that worked well for Sunday’s grid given how distinctly separate its four categories were from one another in subject matter.

Sunday’s puzzle release also coincided with the broader expansion of the New York Times’ word game portfolio, which now includes Connections: Sports Edition, a companion puzzle produced in partnership with The Athletic that challenges players to find hidden links between sports-related terms, following the same core format as the original Connections game but built around athletic themes instead.

Players attempting Sunday’s puzzle are permitted up to four incorrect guesses before the game ends, with each group color-coded upon a correct guess to indicate which of the four difficulty tiers it belongs to. Players looking to track their performance on Sunday’s puzzle, or compare notes with friends, can share their results through Connections’ built-in results screen, which uses colored emoji squares to display a player’s guessing sequence without revealing the actual category words, a sharable format that has become a familiar sight across social media in the years since the game’s launch.

With Sunday’s puzzle now solved, players will have a fresh set of 16 words and four new hidden categories to work through when Monday’s edition of Connections goes live at midnight local time, continuing the daily puzzle’s steady run as one of the Times’ most widely shared games alongside Wordle, Strands and the Mini Crossword.