Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 28 for puzzle #931 is the same as yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 0.5 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: Dusky, Spring, Still, Perrier, Box, Stationary, Gear, Envelope, Noodle, Ratchet, Tube, Static, Pawl, Constant, Soxer, Mailer.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Containers for shipping
- 🟩 Green: Unmoving
- 🟦 Blue: Mechanical watch parts
- 🟪 Purple: Dogs with first letter changed
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: Send it away, but hope it doesn't stop moving. Your watch will tell time thanks to its well-made parts, but hopefully the dog knows how to spell.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #931?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Containers for shipping: Box, envelope, mailer, tube
- 🟩 Unmoving: Constant, static, stationary, still
- 🟦 Mechanical watch parts: Gear, pawl, ratchet, spring
- 🟪 Dogs with first letter changed: Dusky, noodle, perrier, soxer
The Connections Companion was right to rate this puzzle as super easy because, outside of purple, it comes together very easily.
The first one I figured out was green, quickly piecing together that all four involve not moving. From there, I got yellow pretty quickly.
This left me with eight words. I realized that gear, ratchet and spring were machine parts, but I've never heard of pawl. After guessing soxer as some kind of machine part I wasn't aware of, I tried pawl and got it right.
Process of elimination put the purple together.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Airline classes: Business, economy, first, premium
- 🟩 Attribute: Cite, credit, name, reference
- 🟦 Vocation: Calling, craft, line, trade
- 🟪 Ending with alcoholic beverages: Decider, namesake, report, villager
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #930, which had a difficulty rating of 2.7 out of 5.
I failed miserably at today's puzzle, only getting the airline one. For whatever reason, I couldn't connect the other pieces.
Oh well, thankfully I'm just filling in for Scott and Alyse over the holiday, and they're keeping their streak alive!
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.
Need a bit of help with NYT Strands today? No shame in that, and you've come to the right place. Below, we've compiled some useful hints for Strands #662, as well as the answers, should it come to that.
We'll start off with some clues, before building up to the full answer for Strands #662, so read on if you need a little help.
Warning: Spoilers lie ahead for Strands #662.
Today's NYT Strands answer — Today's theme and hints
The official theme for NYT Strands #662 is... "Caroler's count".
And here's an unofficial hint from me: "On the first day...".
If you're still in the dark, here are some useful words to give you those valuable clue tokens:
- CRIMES
- PIPS
- DIALS
- STEWS
- LAWS
- WASP
- MASTER
- SOIL
Still struggling? The spangram touches two opposite sides of the board (but can start and end anywhere), and will give you a hint about the connection between the answers. Today, it starts with 'C' and ends with 'S'.
Scroll down to find out what it is...
It's CHRISTMASDAYS.
Today's Strands answers
So, what are today's Strands answers for game #662?
Drumroll, please...
- PIPERS
- MAIDS
- LORDS
- SWANS
- DRUMMERS
- LADIES
...and the spangram was CHRISTMASDAYS.
Strands #662
“Caroler's count”
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Hi Strands fans, and Merry Christmas! Appropriately, today's puzzle is about as festive as they come. It's also pretty straightforward, meaning it won't keep you from the festivities for too long.
The theme of "Caroler's count" isn't totally obvious, but I could see the word "Christmas" near the top of the board, and quickly converted that to the spangram of CHRISTMASDAYS.
Then I found the word PIPERS spelt backwards down the right-hand side, and realized this was about The 12 Days of Christmas.
Now it was just a case of ticking off the other days from the song. I found MAIDS just below the spangram on the left-hand side, with LORDS below it. SWANS was to its right.
That left two isolated answers to unpick. DRUMMERS was the anagram in the top-left corner, which just left LADIES in the middle to complete the puzzle.
Yesterday's Strands answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Strands answers for game #661.
- COZY
- COMFY
- HOMEY
- WARM
- SOFT
- RELAXING
- PLEASANT
...and the spangram was SNUGASABUG.
Strands #661
“Gather around”
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Hi Strands fans. The theme of "Gather around" made me think this was another Christmas-themed puzzle. It kind of is, in the sense that it's about getting cozy, I just thought it would be more about family gatherings.
With that in mind, I had to use a clue to kick things off. It connected the word COZY, which helped me find COMFY spelt backwards above it. Between the two was a gap that looked ripe for the spangram, and I duly found SNUGASABUG from the left to the bottom-right corner.
I then found HOMEY in the top-right corner, with WARM and SOFT in the gaps between the spangram and my existing answers.
I now had two answers to find in the bottom section. The 'X' proved to be part of RELAXING, spelt backwards in an L shape to the bottom-left corner. That just left PLEASANT to fill the gap and complete the puzzle.
