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Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on March 27 for puzzle #1,020 are significantly easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 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.
Article continues belowToday'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: Turn Signal, Traffic Cone, Brass Tacks, Food Court, The Lorax, Lip Service, Ticket Counter, Bottom Line, Duty-free, Nitty-Gritty, Monarch Butterfly, Monkey Bars, Wedding Reception, Goldfish Cracker, Baggage Claim, and Basic Facts.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: What it all boils down to
- 🟩 Green: Features of an airport terminal
- 🟦 Blue: Things that are orange
- 🟪 Purple: Ending in words for cellular connectivity
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: Orange airports boil down connectivity.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #1,020?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 What it all boils down to: Basic facts, bottom line, brass tacks, nitty-gritty
- 🟩 Features of an airport terminal: Baggage claim, duty-free, food court, ticket counter
- 🟦 Things that are orange: Goldfish cracker, monarch butterfly, the lorax, traffic cone
- 🟪 Ending in words for cellular connectivity: Lip service, monkey bars, turn signal, wedding reception
I took a weird strike trying to put the orange set together. I initially had goldfish cracker, the lorax and traffic cone but I combined it with nitty-gritty. That's a me problem but I was looking at Gritty and thinking of the absurd Philadelphia Flyers mascot who is orange and excellent.
The strike woke me up and I swapped gritty out for monarch butterfly.
I left gritty behind again to get to the airport with baggage claim, duty-free, food court and ticket counter.
I should have made the connectivity connection but I didn't. So I threw in the nitty-gritty, bottom line, brass tacks and basic facts for the yellow set.
Which left lip service, monkey bars, turn signal, and wedding reception for the purple set.
It was a weird one for me today.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Food procurement methods: Agriculture, fishing, gathering, hunting
- 🟩 Member of a Detroit sports team: Lion, piston, red wing, tiger
- 🟦 Features of a classic voting booth: Ballot, booth, curtain, lever
- 🟪 They have bolts: Frankenstein's monster, hardware store, lightning, lock
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1019, which had a difficulty rating of 3.3 out of 5.
Red Wing in the bottom corner clued me to Detroit, though I was initially thinking NHL teams. Piston disabused me of that notion, which is how I nabbed tiger and lion.
I took a strike combining Frankenstein's monster, lightning, lever, and curtain, even though I was looking at voting booth stuff with ballot.
With that in mind, I swapped in ballot and booth for lightning and monster to get the voting booth set.
Agriculture, fishing, gathering, and hunting were always yellow to me. So, now that I'd narrowed things down, I was able to combine monster, hardware store, lightning, and lock.
This left the food procurement words as my final four.
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.
