Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 29 for puzzle #506 are astronomically harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3.8 out of 5.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #505, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #506. 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.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: In pristine condition
- 🟩 Green: Medical roles
- 🟦 Blue: Singular noun in a famous 'Julius Caesar' line
- 🟪 Purple: ____ square
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: For today, recall your Shakespeare, who is training to be your doctor, how to rate baseball cards and get a little square.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #506?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 In pristine condition: Mint, new, original, unused
- 🟩 Medical roles: Attending, fellow, intern, resident
- 🟦 Singular noun in a famous 'Julius Caesar' line: Countryman, ear, friend, Roman
- 🟪 _____ square: Perfect, pocket, times, town
I saw the 3.8 difficulty rating and was admittedly a bit intimidated today and then I saw countryman and Roman. My Shakespeare bells went a ringing. From there it was trying to remember the line from the 'Julius Caesar' play which did take a second.
Here's the line which actually says 'countrymen' not man, spoken by Marc Antony in Act 3: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..."
Knocking out blue early helped make this puzzle a bit easier than the rated number.
Green's medical roles stuck out to me, but that may be because I grew up in a medical family. This one had attending, fellow, intern and residents, different levels of doctors from training to career.
We finally get to the yellow grouping here and mint and original made me think of baseball cards. I briefly considered perfect as that can be a rating but decided against it and went with unused and new instead. It worked.
Purple is a fun fill with perfect square, pocket square, Times Square and town square.
Yesterday's Connections answers
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #505, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
Though today's puzzle took a dive in difficulty, there were enough red herrings between the yellow and purple categories that Alyse struck out a few times trying to link all the words you might hear in a magic act.
Once that turned out to be a dead end, she saw Pandora, Tidal, and Audible and realized that Shazam meant the app, not what a magician might say after pulling a rabbit from their hat.
After that came the blue category. That these verbs all stem from vows for a specific church went over her head; she just recognized them from any number of movie wedding sequences.
Alyse was still convinced Abracadabra and Presto had to be related, but with Spell the only other magical-sounding word left, she was stumped. That is until she scanned the clues again and saw Please and Thank You, and finally, the Connections Crew's cheeky bit of wordplay hit her. Magic words indeed.
That left the green category, and it was easy enough to figure out the link between Mean, Signify, Spell, and Suggest.
