Connections #1231 hides a rhyme trick, and Quordle #1734 gives five vowels

Un indice qui rime avec «car» oriente le groupe violet de Connections du 24 octobre, tandis que Quordle #1734 demande de trouver cinq voyelles.

Rhys Llewellyn By Rhys Llewellyn
3 min read
Connections #1231 hides a rhyme trick, and Quordle #1734 gives five vowels
Illustrative photo. A seated person fills in a newspaper word puzzle with a white pen, shown in close-up with the face out of frame.

In brief

  • Connections #1231 pairs a rhyme clue with a purple group of CANDY, SALAD, SPACE and SPORTS.
  • Quordle #1734 offers five hints, starting with five different vowels and no repeated letters.
  • Connections is playable for free through the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.

Game #1231 of NYT Connections, published for Saturday, October 24, 2026, gives players a single hint for its toughest set: add a word that rhymes with “car”. That clue unlocks a blank-filling category, and TechRadar’s daily guide, TechRadar, spells out the full solution alongside a companion guide for Quordle.

The four Connections groups, by difficulty

Spoilers follow. The groups run from the easiest colour to the hardest, and each one is shown below with its theme and its four words.

Colour Category Words
Green Things on sticks HOBBY HORSE, PINWHEEL, POPSICLE, SPARKLER
Yellow Kinds of strips BACON, COMIC, FILM, MÖBIUS
Blue Online ad formats BANNER, INTERSTITIAL, OVERLAY, POP-UP
Purple _____ BAR CANDY, SALAD, SPACE, SPORTS

On the previous day, game #1230 also closed with a purple group built around a missing word. That one was “_____ TAP”, completed by DOUBLE, LOVE, PHONE and SPINAL, and its hint asked for a word rhyming with “cap”. Two days in a row, then, the hardest set depended on supplying the missing word.

How to play Connections with fewer mistakes

Connections is a New York Times game in which players sort words into groups of four that share something. The difficulty scale is simple: green is the easy one, yellow is a notch up, blue is often quite tough, and purple is generally very hard.

Two rules give some slack. A player may make up to four mistakes, and the last group can often be worked out by elimination, so it does not always have to be solved directly. Even so, TechRadar notes that the game is more involved than Wordle, and that homophones and other wordplay can disguise the answers.

Access costs nothing: the game is offered through the NYT Games site, whether you are on a computer or a phone. A fresh puzzle appears at midnight in each player’s own time zone, so some people are always on “today’s” game while others are still on “yesterday’s”.

Quordle #1734: the clues without the answers

Quordle’s guide for game #1734 lists five hints. The first four give counts and yes-or-no answers, and none of them reveals a word.

5different vowels across the answers (A, E, I, O, U; Y is not counted)
0answers containing a repeated letter
2answers starting with the same letter
  • Vowels: all five standard vowels appear.
  • Repeated letters: none of the answers doubles a letter.
  • Uncommon letters: one of Q, Z, X or J turns up among the answers.
  • Starting letters: two answers share their first letter.

Compare that with game #1733 from Friday, October 23. It had four different vowels and no repeated letters either, but none of Q, Z, X or J appeared, and no two answers began with the same letter.

Where Quordle sits next to Wordle

TechRadar describes Quordle as one of the first alternatives to Wordle, and says it is still going strong after more than 1,500 games. Its columnist sends readers who want the original viral word game to a separate daily Wordle column, and to the Connections and Strands pages for the other New York Times puzzles.

The Quordle grid follows the same rhythm as Connections: a new one arrives each day at midnight in the player’s time zone.

Photo: SHVETS production / Pexels

Rhys Llewellyn

Tech, mobile, apps, streaming, gaming and online safety

Rhys Llewellyn

Rhys Llewellyn covers phones, laptops and smart home gear for Fastweb Media. He spent a few years selling consumer electronics in Cardiff, which taught him that most returns come from setup headaches rather than faulty hardware, and he writes his reviews with that in mind. He tests everything for a few weeks before judging it and plays five-a-side on Thursday nights, badly.