Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on November 15 for puzzle #888 are an eensy bit harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.3 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category's difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you've made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.
Today's Connections words are: Twilight, Season, Film, Period, Stage, Slash, Time, Method, Salt, Comfort, Dash, Flavor, Character, Colon, Buffer, and Spice.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Enhance the taste of
- 🟩 Green: Punctuation marks
- 🟦 Blue: Kinds of actors
- 🟪 Purple: ____ Zone
These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today's Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.
Here's a larger hint: Spice up writing in the actor zone.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #888?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Enhance the taste of: Flavor, salt, season, spice
- 🟩 Punctuation marks: Colon, dash, period, slash
- 🟦 Kinds of actors: Character, film, method, stage
- 🟪 ____ Zone: Buffer, comfort, time, twilight
I saw dash and spice and was thinking of Mrs. Dash. So, I immediately took three strikes trying to force dash to work with flavor, salt, season, or spice. I didn't calm down until that third strike.
I finally woke up and dropped dash to complete the yellow set. So, that's how my day started.
Sticking with dash, I saw the punctuation marks in colon, period and slash. Time zone is what clicked with me next. Which is how I got twilight zone, buffer zone and comfort zone.
And I wrapped up the puzzle with character, film, method and stage as kinds of actors.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Evaluate: Grade, judge, rate, review
- 🟩 Radio tuning options: Band, channel, frequency, station
- 🟦 Action film subgenres: Buddy, disaster, martial arts, superhero
- 🟪 Classic '90s action films: Armageddon, hard boiled, heat, speed
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #887, which had a difficulty rating of 2.2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I had some fun with today's puzzle as I was left thinking of some of my favorite action movies.
I started with Hard Boiled which put me in the action mindset. Heat and Speed followed. Armageddon isn't a movie I think of as an action classic, despite it being directed by Michael Bay and some of the asteroid scenes. That's my evaluation if you will.
I turned away from the action though as I was looking at frequency thinking about radios. Band, channel and station solidified that line of thinking.
I clicked on the genres finally with martial arts and buddy. Disaster and superhero closed up the blue.
Which left grade, judge, rate and review as the final four for the yellow set.
Connections tips — how to win at Connections
There are two ways to play Connections, get the answers as you solve them or solve for the hardest group, Purple, first.
For either playstyle, the best tip I can give is to not be afraid of the shuffle button, especially if you’ve solved a set but you’re certain it isn’t the Purple group. You can shuffle the grid until your solved quartet is in a somewhat staked off area.
For the purple group, you can expect to see a handful of category types: words missing a letter, homophones, words with specific suffixes or prefixes, and [blank] word (or word [blank]). There are others, but this is a majority of what you’ll see. It can help to look for purple connections through one of those lenses.
If you’re not hunting for purple specifically, then the best advice I have is to look for smaller connections. For example, Riddler and Joker are Batman villains. Once you’ve grouped that duo together it’s easier to find another set.
Finally, watch out for traps. Occasionally, the Connections makers like to throw in a set of words that should seem very obvious to most people. But picking them can give you a strike, something you want to save for when you aren’t really sure between a couple of clues.
The tricky bit is that sometimes the very obvious foursome is actually one of the answers (usually the yellow or green levels).
One way to work around this is to note the four clues you think are an obvious set. Highlight them by selecting the words but don’t hit submit. From there take a second look around the grid to see if anything else stands out to you.
Often these super obvious sets are actually individually spread out between the four groups. So, if you see Wick, Neo, Ted and Mnemonic, you might immediately think of Keanu Reeves movies, but it's a trick. Instead, use the individual words as launching points to discover other connections.
If you're new to the game you should also take a look at our How to play Connections guide.
Got some thoughts about today's puzzle you want to share? Email us at scott.younker@futurenet.com or alyse.stanley@futurenet.com to get in touch.
