“Connections” December 28: Hints and answers for puzzle #566

Holding one Connections Starting a winning streak can be quite a tiring task. So if you need some helpful hints and tips then Newsweek has your back.

The brainteaser was created by The New York Times in June 2023 and has become the newspaper’s second most played game Wordleanother word based puzzle.

Connections challenges players to uncover threads that connect a series of words. Instructions on how to play the game can be found below. You can find clues and answers for today’s puzzle at the end of the article.

How to play “Connections.”

Connections tasks players with dividing 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, in Friday’s game, the words “bacon,” “grits,” “hash,” and “toast” were linked in the “breakfast side dishes” category.

Each of the four categories is marked with a color that also indicates its level of difficulty. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and purple. The puzzles are rarely easy and use homophones and puns, among other things, to challenge players.

The familiarity of the words used and how often they appear in modern life are also difficulty factors, although less common words are not only used in the more difficult categories. “Element overlap,” where a word can be linked to multiple categories, is another possibility Connections tests players.

If players get stuck, they can press the shuffle button, which shuffles the words where they appear on the screen.

Wyna Liu, crossword editor at The New York Times which has developed Connectionstold Newsweek about their recommended tips for playing the game.

“My best advice is to wait as long as possible before guessing,” she said.

“Maybe you see the board and have fully identified the category by seeing five words that could belong in that category,” Liu continued. “Don’t try to guess the four words in this category, because even though you know what the fifth element is, you don’t know which of the four it may not be,” which would ultimately waste a turn.

“Don’t do what I do, which is ‘getting rid of anger,'” Liu said.

The answers for today Connections The mysteries are revealed at the end of this article. So scroll carefully if you want to solve them yourself.

Newsweek has some pointers to help you understand today’s Connections categories.