Today's puzzle is not about Pokémon.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for August 27 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,173. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,172, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
What is Connections
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.
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
Today's Connection Grid and Words
- Pikachu
- Spunk
- Nemo
- Dove
- Misty
- Slate
- Lightning
- Ash
- Pewter
- Brock
- Emotional
- Live Wire
- Overcome
- Electric Eel
- Wrap
- Choked Up
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Zap
- 🟩 Green: Wept
- 🟦 Blue: Neutral
- 🟪 Purple: Musical
Today's Connections Group Hints
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Electric things
- 🟩 Green: Moved to tears
- 🟦 Blue: Shades of gray
- 🟪 Purple: Music genre plus starting letter
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.
Today's Connections answers
The Connections answers on August 27 for puzzle #1,173 are an eensy bit easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.7 out of 5.
- 🟨 Electric things: Electric eel, lightning, live wire, pikachu
- 🟩 Moved to tears: Choked up, emotional, misty, overcome
- 🟦 Shades of gray: Ash, dove, pewter, slate
- 🟪Music genre plus starting letter: Brock, nemo, spunk, wrap
I tried a Pokemon set just to see at the start, but it was obviously wrong.
So I started with Pikachu to chase electrical things with live wire, electric eel and lightning.
Misty put me on the tears path with choked up, emotional, and overcome.
It wasn't Ash but Pewter (I was thinking Pewter City) when I put together the blue set of dove and slate.
Which left Brock and the music genres hidden in nemo, spunk, and wrap.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 "There you have it!": Behold, presto, shazam, voila
- 🟩 Knack: Forte, gift, strength, talent
- 🟦 What "P" might stand for: Page, Park, Phosphorus, piano
- 🟪Key ____: Chain, largo, lime, signature
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,172, which had a difficulty rating of 1.8 out of 5.
I spotted the yellow and green categories pretty quickly. So then I took a moment to suss out the purple and blue sets.
Key Largo is how I found the keys with Key Lime, Key chain, and key signature.
Conveniently, three of the four Ps lined up in the drop, so I put in page, phosphorus, piano and then park to wrap it up.
The tadas seemed to be the yellow set, so I threw in forte, gift, strength and talent for the green set.
Which left behold, presto, shazam and voila.
