Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 25 for puzzle #867 are a 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: Date, Vest, Light, Shaft, Ray, Fleece, Alarm, Lincoln, Grant, Milk, Hose, Award, Hustle, Stopwatch, Accord, and Capote
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Swindle
- 🟩 Green: Digital watch features
- 🟦 Blue: Confer
- 🟪 Purple: Best actor-winning biopics
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: Watch the time as y'all agree on which movie to sneak popcorn into.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #867?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Swindle: Fleece, Hose, Hustle, Shaft
- 🟩 Digital watch features: Alarm, Date, Light, Stopwatch
- 🟦 Confer: Accord, Award, Grant, Vest
- 🟪 Best actor-winning biopics: Capote, Lincoln, Milk, Ray
After I saw Lincoln and Grant, I thought surely there must be some other presidential clues hiding in today's puzzle. When that was a dead end, I started thinking about other meanings and remembered Daniel Day-Lewis' biopic "Lincoln." I nabbed Milk, Capote, and Ray to round out the rest of purple.
The second group I saw was green with Alarm, Date, Light, and Stopwatch, all features I've seen a million times on the small screen on my wrist.
I hadn't picked up any synonym categories, so I looked around and scooped up Accord, Award, Grant, and Vest for blue.
That left yellow as today's rote fill with another group of five-finger synonyms: Fleece, Hose, Hustle, and Shaft.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Best years: Heyday, pinnacle, prime, zenith
- 🟩 Things you can do to text: Bold, highlight, strikethrough, underline
- 🟦 Things known for being colorful things: Kaleidoscope, peacock, rainbow, sunset
- 🟪 Ending in accessories: Baywatch, cootie, herring, kingpin
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #866, which had a difficulty rating of 2.5 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
The titles in this puzzle needed some editing, like the green set of bold, highlight, strikethrough, and underline that I saw first. Perhaps it could have just been titled "copyediting."
Or the second group I saw, which I was initially thinking of as rainbow colors in kaleidoscope, peacock, and rainbow. It took a minute to accept sunset, but I got there. The title is cumbersome.
Moving on, prime and zenith stuck out, and I saw pinnacle and heydey pretty quickly after. Assuming this was the yellow I entered in the other four words.
All of which are hiding a fashion accessory: baywatch, cootie, herring, and kingpin.
Anyway, enjoy the weekend.
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.
