Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on November 5 for puzzle #878 are much harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.5 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: Knight, Coat, Butcher, Baker, Flack, Knife, Candlestick, Maker, Franklin, Forest, Bow, Blow, Spoil, Wrench, Botch, and Rope.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Make a hash of
- 🟩 Green: Weapons in the game of Clue
- 🟦 Blue: Iconic soul singers
- 🟪 Purple: Rain ____
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: Play in the soul rain without error.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #878?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Make a hash of: Blow, botch, butcher, spoil
- 🟩 Weapons in the game Clue: Candlestick, knife, rope, wrench
- 🟦 Iconic soul singers: Baker, flack, franklin, knight
- 🟪 Rain ____: Bow, coat, forest, maker
Forgetting that today's puzzle was rated on the harder side, I took a first strike trying the obvious butcher, baker, candlestick, maker set in the corner. Sometimes these super obvious sets are true in the lower-rated puzzles, but it was a trap here.
That said, the strike was good because I knew this set would be split among the other groups.
Candlestick is where I went first, and wrench 'clued' me into the board game nature. Knife and rope were quick finds after that.
I next hit on the baker, where I was thinking of names. Which is why I picked Franklin and Knight. The only other word that worked for me here was Flack since butcher and maker would be in other sets. At this point, I wasn't considering soul singers so I was not thinking of the iconic Roberta Flack because, for some reason, my mind kept wanting it to be Bela Fleck, the banjo player. Alas.
Sticking with jobs, I went with a butcher and got the yellow set with blow, botch, and spoil.
I closed out today's puzzle with Rainbow, raincoat, rainforest, and rainmaker.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Steer: Direct, drive, guide, pilot
- 🟩 Thin layer: Coat, film, leaf, sheet
- 🟦 File extensions: Doc, mid, tiff, zip
- 🟪 ____ Guitar: Air, electric, rhythm, slide
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #877, which had a difficulty rating of 2.8 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Today was weird for me, mostly because I got mentally stuck on a couple terms that weren't really there.
To start, I nabbed the yellow first with direct, drive, guide and pilot. This was after I tried putting together a Google products group with drive, doc, sheet and slide. Though, save drive the other ones are pluralized.
Next, electric tipped to me as a guitar, which got me air guitar, then slide, and finally rhythm.
For a while, I was not thinking of the .tiff file type but rather the Toronto International Film Festival, which I could not let go of as I solved the puzzle.
What saved me today was solving yellow and purple. With zip and doc I finally recalled tiff. I only chose mid because it fit the format better than the other sets.
I was not familiar with .mid having only seen the longer .midi form. Apparently, .mid is a remnant of Windows 95 and is largely not used anymore.
I closed it out with coat, film, leaf and sheet.
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.
