Connections answers for February 6, 2026 (Puzzle #971)

Puzzle #971, released Friday, February 6, 2026 (ET), leaned into everyday objects, visual patterns, and a classic wordplay twist. The grid’s difficulty curve was fairly clean: two concrete categories you could spot quickly, one themed language pattern, and a final set built around sound-alikes that likely tripped up anyone trying to force “real” greetings into the same group.

The four confirmed groups

Here are the completed categories and their members:

Why the Yellow group clicks fast

The easiest entry point is the coffee-station cluster: once you spot two of the disposables together, the rest follow naturally. This is the kind of category that rewards thinking in “where would I see these items together?” rather than trying to find synonyms.

It’s also a good example of how the puzzle uses ordinary context to hide obvious answers in plain sight—each word is generic on its own, but unmistakable as a set once the setting becomes clear.

The Green group’s visual logic

The “stripes” group is straightforward, but it’s built with variety: something edible, something in the street, something worn, and an animal. That diversity can slow you down if you’re only looking for one domain (like “animals” or “clothing”).

The clue is that the shared trait is purely visual. Once you treat “referee” as shorthand for the striped shirt, the group locks.

The Blue group’s language pattern

The third group is a neat construction: four words that become insect names when you add “fly.” The best way to solve this type is to test combinations out loud:

• butterfly

• dragonfly

• firefly

• horsefly

If you found yourself thinking “these don’t look like they belong together,” that was the point—this is a pattern group that only reveals itself when you mentally attach the same ending.

The Purple group’s trick: sound-alikes

The hardest group is a classic Connections move: it isn’t “greetings,” it’s homophones of greetings. That subtle shift turns what seems like a simple theme into a phonetics puzzle.

Each word sounds like a greeting:

• CHOW → “ciao”

• HAY → “hey”

• HIGH → “hi”

• YEOH → “yo”

If you were hunting for literal greeting words, you’d miss it. The group is built to reward saying the tiles aloud rather than reading them silently.

What made Puzzle #971 feel “fair”

This board balanced concrete objects (coffee station) with pattern recognition (fly compounds) and a wordplay finisher (homophones). Most solvers who avoided overthinking early should have had a clean path: snag Yellow or Green, use elimination pressure to surface Blue, then let Purple fall into place once the remaining words looked “wrong” as a normal category.

Sources consulted: The New York Times Games, TechRadar, TheGamer, Forbes