Club Benefits
Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on January 12 for puzzle #946 are a smidge easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.7 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: Handshake, Compact, Armchair, Expert, Console, Headquarter, Novice, Footstool, Understanding, Pumpernickel, Proficient, Agreement, Ceftazidime, Intermediate, Bookcase, and Moneypenny
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Living room furniture
- 🟩 Green: Experience levels
- 🟦 Blue: Promise
- 🟪 Purple: Ending in U.S. coins
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: Unpack and change the difficulty before you sign over your last dime.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #946?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Living room furniture: Armchair, Bookcase, Console, Footstool
- 🟩 Experience levels: Expert, Intermediate, Novice, Proficient
- 🟦 Promise: Agreement, Compact, Handshake, Understanding
- 🟪 Ending in U.S. coins: Ceftazidime, Headquarter, Moneypenny, Pumpernickel
Ceftazidime is a word I've only ever seen in a textbook and looks like it should be illegal with that spelling, so I figured why not start there? With no other medical-related words on the board I could find, I broke it down into its parts for any clues, and "dime" was really the only one that made any sense. Moneypenny was a dead giveaway that I was on the right track, and I nabbed Heaquarter and Pumpernickel for the rest of purple.
Expert and Intermediate made me think of DDR back in my mall rat days. I looked around for other difficulty level settings and came up with Novice and, after a moment, Proficient to solve green.
Agreement, Handshake, and Understanding definitely seemed to go together, but I couldn't figure out a fourth to go along with it. So next came yellow with Armchair, Bookcase, and Footstool. All that reminiscing about video games kept me from recognizing that Console could apply too.
That left blue as today's rote fill. Turns out Compact was the one I was missing.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Group: Band, Crew, Pack, Team
- 🟩 Plunge: Crash, Crater, Drop, Tank
- 🟦 Parts of a sink: Basin, Drain, Faucet, Stopper
- 🟪 Equestrian gear: Bit, Crop, Halter, Saddle
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #944, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
I kicked things off by falling into what was, in retrospect, an obvious trap. I assumed Halter, Tank, and Crop had to all be types of shirts, but when I couldn't find a fourth, I realized I was off course. Stopper made me think of those big cork ones in old-timey cartoons, and took a stab with all the lavatory-themed words I could find: Basin, Drain, and Faucet.
Ok, so if Halter wasn't a shirt, it had to be something to do with a horse, or else I was completely lost. Saddle seemed a good sign I was headed in the right direction, and I scooped up Bit and Crop to solve purple.
Yellow came next with a gaggle of synonyms in Band, Crew, Pack, and Team.
That left green as today's rote fill with Crash, Crater, Drop, and Tank. Crater you don't hear used in that context as much these days, so it threw me for a loop.
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.
