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Why is today’s NYT Connections puzzle so interesting? The Puzzle No. 544 is emerging as a word game that fans of word games are diving into with conversations among other fans about its mix of categories and difficulty level.
The New York Times’ daily word association puzzle Connections continues to enchant players around the world. The 16 words that are grouped to four categories and difficulty levels that need to be solved by the solver during the game. For those tackling today's puzzle, this article shares hints, insights, and a place to remember the experience.
The difficulty level of today’s puzzle is 2.8 out of 5. The rating works on a scale from 1 to 4, with testers who complete the puzzles before the public release determining the rating by averaging their experiences. This score tells us that we have a mix of easy and hard categories, something for everyone.
On the simplest side, yellow; on the most difficult, purple, often even the most seasoned solvers. Green and blue fall there, somewhere between terror and fun.
_CONNECTIONS PUZZLES_ release at midnight in each time zone. Two puzzle companions are available daily based on Eastern Standard Time so that players across the globe can easily find something to play. By doing this, players from several regions can participate in the discussion without excessive wait time.
Today’s NYT Connections include a range of categories – some are logical groupings, some are less so, but all are thought provoking. So yellow is always the easiest to crack and it’s a great place to start. Purple requires thought, though: It's purple, and so it's careful, but it's also purple, and that means there are words with overlapping meaning or unexpected connections.
For those who benefit from a nudge, hints are available. When clicking or tapping one of the difficulty levels, one word of that category drops down revealing a clue, but not the answer.
For those who want a taste of today’s categories without spoiling the answer, here are a few hints:
Yellow: Use words related to confusion.
Green: Spells that bring about a negative effect.
Blue: The Pixar Toy Story iconic toys, nickname.
Purple: The ending words trending in slang.
These hints allow solvers to get a head start on the solving without losing too much ability to connect the dots.
This is useful for anyone who requires a hint, as clicking on a difficulty level will provide a word of that category in order to close the gap in choice without revealing the answer itself. These hints can help make the process a bit easier and less annoying.
A good strategy consists in starting with the simpler yellow category. That solves can give you momentum and make some of the other categories feel easier to conquer. For the purple category — the most technical and often the trickiest — attention to detail, and a bit of lateral thinking, will add up to a big boost.
Don't worry, there's always tomorrow to play something you don't know how to solve today. The allure of the game, to keep people coming back, is relatively fresh challenges and constantly varying and creative categories.
Connections No. 544 proves conclusively that the NYT Connections puzzle team has the right rhythm. Today's game appeals to such a broad audience due to the fact that it has categories from simple words that you recognize like the Squares in the Rows to others that are more focused, such as "Toy Story Characters" and "Colloquial Suffixes." Simple, but complex, it offers an enjoyable challenge for everyone.
Ready for the next puzzle? See you tomorrow, join the discussion!
