News week is back today with a new series of practical tips and solutions for The New York Times‘ Connections game.
Each Connections puzzle includes 16 words, which players must sort into four categories. The goal is to find the common theme for each category, represented by colors: yellow, green, blue and purple. The categories increase in difficulty, with yellow being the simplest, followed by green, blue and finally purple, the most difficult and often the most abstract. Some words may appear to fit more than one category, which can be misleading.
Despite this, each group only has four unique words. For example, for yesterday’s puzzle, the words “Cap, Cover, Plug, Seal” made up the yellow “things that prevent leaks” category. The most difficult purple category answers were “Gator, Sooner, Volunteer, Wolverine,” which were the names of members of the college football team.
The game’s publisher, Wyna Liu, previously stated that there are varying difficulty levels between the categories offered each day.
“Some categories could be defined by their use of puns – palindromes, homophones, adding or removing letters and words – rather than the literal meaning of the words on the cards. I saw three areas of potential difficulty that could be adjusted: the familiarity of the words, the ambiguity of their categorization and the variety of puns,” Liu said.
When asked what advice she could give to players, she added: “One suggestion that can help take some of the guesswork out of it is if you start selecting cards and notice that there are five or more that belong to this category, try moving to a different category before doing this.
Below are some tips to help you solve today’s riddle, but if you don’t want to see the answers, scroll down with caution.
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Connections #525 Clues for Sunday, November 17
YELLOW: To join with a common goal.
Green: How tight clothes can feel.
Blue: Bend down to perform an activity.
Purple: Where a certain punctuation mark can be useful.
Connections#525 Responses from Sunday, November 17
Yellow category: “ALLIANCE”
Yellow words: Association, guild, league, union
Green: “ADJUSTMENT AFTER”
Green words: Sticky, stylish, slinky, cozy
Blue: “OCCASIONS WHERE WE CAN ARRANGE”
Blue words: Apologies, dubbing, prayer, proposal
Purple: “WHAT AN APOSTROPH COULD INDICATE”
purple words: Contraction, foot, possessive, quote
Did you guess the answers correctly? If so, congratulations. Otherwise, my commiserations, you will be happy to know that there will be another opportunity tomorrow.
Connections are released at midnight in your local time zone and News week will be back tomorrow with a new set of tips and tricks for Monday’s match.
