Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 21 for puzzle #863 are much easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2 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, #862, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #863. 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: Bucks, Does, Bulls, Drones, Queens, Hornets, Addressses, Televisions, Garage Doors, Handles, Kings, Jacks, Spurs, Aces, Tackles, and Wiis.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Playing cards
- 🟩 Green: Takes on
- 🟦 Blue: N.B.A. teams
- 🟪 Purple: Things you can control with remotes
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: Take on a basketball game with a remote card.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #863?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Playing cards: Aces, jacks, kings, queens
- 🟩 Takes on: Aces, jacks, kings, queens
- 🟦 N.B.A. teams: Bucks, bulls, hornets, spurs
- 🟪 Things you can control with remotes: Drones, garage doors, televisions, wiis
I was Bucks, Bulls, Hornets and Spurs right away and was briefly concerned that it was trap, but it turned out to be the blue set.
Sticking with basketball teams I saw Aces and was thinking WNBA but I saw Kings and figured it was playing cards. Thus jacks and queens.
I noticed that several words were plural actions in does, handles, tackles and addresses.
And I closed it out with the purple set of drones, garage doors, televisions and wiis, which are all controlled with remotes.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Affliction: Bugbear, Complex, Demon, Hang-Up
- 🟩 Represented by constellations: Big Bear, Centaur, Hunter, Lyre
- 🟦 Periodic table symbols: AS, B, I, K
- 🟪 ___corn: A, Capri, Pop, Uni
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #862, which had a difficulty rating of 3.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
The Connections Crew has clearly been helping seal the Honmoon with today's clues of K, Pop, Demon, and Hunter across the top. I went down the line today, and started by rounding up some synonyms like Complex, Demon, Hang-Up, and Bubear — a fun word I don't think we get enough mileage out of.
After that, I dug into what little I learned of tarot during covid lockdowns to tap Centaur, Big Bear, Hunter, and Lyre for green.
Lots of letters left, so I figured we were looking for either some kind of grammatical clue or the table of elements. I was right with the latter: AS, B, I, and K.
I was scratching my head for a second over Capri (mostly because my brain went to Capri Sun instead of anything more useful), but once I saw Pop and Uni, I realized a big lump with knobs was missing from all these clues. It took me longer than I care to admit to figure out why A (for a-corn) was the fourth.
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.
