If your experience with today’s Connections puzzle is growing sour, you may want to take a step back, refresh, and come back to it with new eyes. That will allow you to uncover the rest of the puzzle’s secrets and unravel it completely. However, you may need a little help, particularly with the last two categories today, and to help you out, you can use these hints to get you from slightly frustrated to winning with confidence.
Sometimes Connections can feel difficult and as if you do not understand the right connotations to the puzzle. However, if you want a puzzle that can still make you think without some of those difficulties, you should check out the NYT’s Mini Crossword puzzle. It will still present some difficulty, but it is a free and bite-sized version of the traditional newspaper puzzle, and players will enjoy having a great time as they seek to overcome it. It is not so difficult that you cannot solve it, nor so big that it takes all day.
Today’s Connections Category Hints
DECEMBER 18 #556
If you want some hints for today’s puzzle, it is quite understandable. There are many different problems with any given Connections puzzle that players must solve in order to succeed. Sometimes, that just amounts to figuring out what each individual word actually means. To discover what this puzzle is hiding, you will want to pay quite close attention to some of the lesser-known words.
- One category is four words that describe a person doing something to solve something problematic
- One category is about four different types of the same beverage
- One category is about four words that are often used in one job in particular
- One category is about four words that can all come before a different word in a phrase – that word is a shape
Related
5 Letter Words Wordle Hasn’t Used Yet (Updated Daily)
Wordle, the popular word-guessing game hosted by The New York Times, has over 1,700 words remaining as possible solutions.
If you still need some help solving today’s puzzle, there are a few more hints to come. These hints take the form of category names, which are often all you need to finish solving a puzzle. To get the full spoilers, keep scrolling to the “Answers” section.
 |
DEAL WITH |
 |
STYLES OF BEER |
 |
INVESTMENT VERBS |
 |
___ DOME |
Today’s Connections Answers
DECEMBER 18 #556
Yellow Answers: Revealed & Explained
|
DEAL WITH |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
FIELD |
HANDLE |
MANAGE |
TACKLE |
This category I found is somewhat easy to solve but very hard to give hints for without using the same words that the category name has. These kinds of categories can often be the hardest to give you hints for, but that is fine. The real problem here is FIELD and TACKLE looking like sportsball words, but luckily there are no other words in the puzzle that can go with them to trip you up. However, they might mean you do waste some precious time eliminating them as potential guesses from other words.
Green Answers: Revealed & Explained
|
STYLES OF BEER |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
BITTER |
BOCK |
SOUR |
STOUT |
Weirdly, despite not drinking beer much myself, this is the category I got first. To be fair, I got it based more on what the words themselves meant than the actual types of beer, but it did get me a win early and eliminated four words from the guessing pool. It’s kind of nice when you get a category right by the wrong methods regardless. BOCK was the one word I was not 100% sure on, but it fit in with the rest of these words and nothing else seemed to, making it an ideal choice.
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The Tiles game for the New York Times mobile app asks you to use various strategies to pair matching visual patterns together to build huge combos.
Blue Answers: Revealed & Explained
|
INVESTMENT VERBS |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
HEDGE |
HOLD |
SHORT |
TRADE |
This is where things got more difficult for me, particularly because I am not as familiar with investment terminology as I should be. It is also weird to me that SHORT and HEDGE are used as verbs, so that is hard to get if you are less familiar with this one. TRADE and HOLD make the most sense, but that makes less sense with the remaining words. It is hard to get the right combination of words when both of those things are true, beyond that the next category is fairly random.
Purple Answers: Revealed & Explained
|
___ DOME |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
CAPITOL |
CHROME |
ONION |
TEAPOT |
This last one is a category that feels very random when you first look at it. ONION and TEAPOT don’t generally have a lot in common. To be fair, as someone who was quite obsessed with making tea, I actually have never called anything a TEAPOT dome before. In fact, I have only ever heard of CHROME and CAPITOL before “dome” in the past, at least in my memory. I may just not be remembering correctly, but that is all I could remember upon solving this puzzle.
Other Games Like Connections
If you still want some puzzling time today, you can check out the following options in the table below:
|
Game Name |
How To Play |
Is It Free To Play? |
|---|---|---|
|
Wordle (NYT) |
Solve a random five-letter word by using color clues. Every Wordle answer can be found in our daily updated list. |
Yes |
|
Hello Wordl |
Very similar to Wordle, where players change the number of letters in the word. |
Yes |
|
The Password Game |
Create a password in this ever-changing, not-so-simple game. You can find some helpful tips in our Password Game guide. |
Yes |
|
Worldle |
Name a country based only on its silhouette, and a few geographical hints. |
Yes |
- Released
- June 12, 2023
- Developer(s)
- The New York Times Company
- Publisher(s)
- The New York Times Company
- ESRB
- e
- Platform(s)
- Web Browser , Mobile
