Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on December 5 for puzzle #908 are a bit 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.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #907, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #908. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
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: Sorry, Tough, Deal, Baby, Sweet, Sticky, Pillow, Story, Mastermind, Small, Delicate, Operation, Complex, Status, Mouse Trap, and Situation.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Tricky
- 🟩 Green: State of affairs
- 🟦 Blue: Classic board games
- 🟪 Purple: ____ Talk
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: Talk tricky around classic affairs.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #908?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Tricky: Complex, delicate, sticky, tough
- 🟩 State of affairs: Deal, situation, status, story
- 🟦 Classic board games: Mastermind, mouse trap, operation, sorry
- 🟪 ____ Talk: Baby, pillow, small, sweet
Mouse Trap being the only two word clue stuck out to me and immediately made me think of the classic rube goldberg game. With that in mind, I went looking for games operation was nearly right above. Mastermind came next, and I scanned through until I found Sorry in the upper left corner.
Once the grid reset, pillow caught my attention and I immediately though of the phrase "pillow talk." Sweet and baby were nearby. I did take a strike when I tried tough. I swapped it out for small to get the purple set.
Returning to tough, I thought it went with delicate and sticky. Complx was the only other word that seemed to work after that.
And I wrapped it up with deal, situation, status, and story. It feels like I've hit the green set last nearly every day in the last week, yesterday's reverse rainbow notwithstanding.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Cuddle: Draw close, hold tight, nuzzle, spoon
- 🟩 Imbibe: Guzzle, knock back, pound down, swill
- 🟦 Things you assemble: Ikea furniture, lego set, model, puzzle
- 🟪 Snouts: Beak, muzzle, proboscis, rostrum
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #907, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
I went reverse rainbow today after looking up what a rostrum is. I saw the word, and it felt familiar, but I could not recall a definition to save my life. There is, in the crossword community, I've found, a disdain for looking up answers, but I figure looking things up is part of learning. Now I know that a rostrum is specifically a hard, beak-like structure that protrudes or is part of the mouth of a creature.
Proboscis, beak and muzzle quickly followed as "snouts."
Lego set keyed me into the things you put together group of IKEA furniture, models and puzzles.
Speaking of mouths, guzzle and swill get you to pound down and knock back.
And I closed things out with draw close, hold tight, nuzzle and spoon as cuddly terms.
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.
