Today's Connections Hints & Answers For October 17, 2024 (Puzzle #493)

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If you find yourself stuck in today’s Connections puzzle, you might want to park here and consider the clues we have for you. Today’s puzzle has some nuances that might be hard to spot, as well as a tricky starting category. If you want help navigating these potential problems, there are plenty of ways we can guide you through the turbulent waters with clues, tips, and some spoilers at the end.

If you like Connections, you should play a daily puzzle called The Password Game. It is a game that is both consistent and constantly changing. While the basic rules you must follow are always the same, the solution will change, and you will have to adapt. The problems you attempt to solve include solving the daily Wordle and ensuring the numbers in the password all add up to a certain total. It is a good way to create a challenge for yourself and allows you to play with numbers and words.

In today’s crafty puzzle, players will find themselves looking for synonyms, hunting for pop culture references, and figuring out the last word in a phrase. I personally like it when there is a lot of variance in a Connections puzzle, and this puzzle feels like it hits the right balance between variety and a few tricky words that can stump you if you are not careful. With that in mind, to help you avoid those tricky words, here are four clues to help you out:

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.

If you want to expand on those clues further, we have all four category names ready for you to peek at.

GRASSY AREA

DEAL WITH

MOVIES WITH "S" REMOVED

___ LAW

GRASSY AREA

GREEN

LAWN

PARK

YARD

I love a beautiful grassy area, especially if nice wildflowers are also involved. However, the tricky part of this category is the word FIELD. In my experience, it is a much more common word used to mean this kind of space, and it can be hard to decide which of the five possible words to cut. My main advice, and what I did, was to look at each word and see what else they could mean. In the end, both Field and PARK were potential candidates to get cut, and I happened to guess correctly.

DEAL WITH

ADDRESS

ANSWER

FIELD

HANDLE

This one becomes more obvious once you have removed FIELD from the previous category. ADDRESS and ANSWER already felt like they went well together, and FIELD now has to go here. Moving on from that, most of the other words have the same feel and cannot be used in a “verb” form, leaving HANDLE to take the fourth and final spot. This is an instance where solving the first category really helped and even led me to the solution for the second one.

Wordle, the popular word-guessing game hosted by The New York Times, has over 1,700 words remaining as possible solutions.

MOVIES WITH "S" REMOVED

CAR

GOODFELLA

JAW

SWINGER

Usually, I feel pretty confident about the movie-related categories, but I did not hold myself up to that one today. This category was much more difficult than usual for me, as I simply did not recognize that these were movies without their full titles. I was stuck on GOODFELLA belonging with HARVARD for a couple of reasons. However, with this category, it was more of a lack of context and a failure to recognize the missing element. If you are struggling, try saying the words in slightly different ways to see if that rings a bell.

___ LAW

CRIMINAL

HARVARD

LEMON

NATURAL

While I was fairly confident that three of these words belonged together, LEMON was not one I had in mind. I thought GOODFELLA made a lot more sense as a potential name that had to do with law, but LEMON law was not something I had heard of before. However, I know what it means and can recognize it if something goes wrong when I make a big purchase. So Connections has taught me a valuable lesson today, even if I did not see it then.

If you are interested in trying out more puzzles today, check out Hello Wordl, which incorporates your favorite things about Wordle but with more chaos.

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

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