Looking for clues for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on October 3 for puzzle #845 are slightly harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 2.3 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, #844, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #845. 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: Edge, Football, Editor, Memory, Tornado, Edward, Limit, Eddy, Edelweiss, Tasmanian Devil, Education, Cabaret, Border, Past Tense, Mamma Mia, and Extremity.
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Boundary
- 🟩 Green: They move in a spiral
- 🟦 Blue: Songs from musicals
- 🟪 Purple: What "Ed" might indicate
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: Spin through the edge of an Ed musical.
Today's Connections answers
So, what are today's Connections answers for game #845?
Drumroll, please...
- 🟨 Boundary: Border, edge, extremity, limit
- 🟩 They move in a spiral: Eddy, football, tasmanian devil, tornado
- 🟦 Songs from musicals: Cabaret, edelweiss, mamma mia, memory
- 🟪 What "ED" might indicate: Editor, education, edward, past tense
I went straight rainbow today without really meaning to. Sometimes I try to find the different color sets, and others I just grab what pops out to me first. Today was the latter.
Edge and limit were my first clues. Then I picked up border and extremeity.
I saw Taz next and was thinking of swirls, which is why I nabbed eddy and tornado. It took a second to find football because I was looking for swirls, not spirals. Nothing else
Cabaret and Mamma Mia were next as musicals. Edelweiss and Memory I recognized as from musicals, so that helped clear up the blue set.
And I wrapped up the puzzle with the ED words of editor, education, edward, and past tense.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Dog commands: Come, down, heel, stay
- 🟩 Deserved: Due, fair, just, right
- 🟦 Situated: Left, placed, put, set
- 🟪 Best animated feature Oscar winners: Brave, flow, frozen, up
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #844, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.
The purple category leapt out to me initially as Pixar films with Brave and Up. Frozen was the next obvious one, but I was unaware it won an Oscar. Anyway, Flow was the only other word that I recalled as a film.
The blue, green and yellow sets could have been a coin flip and I guessed which words went with which colors. I guessed mostly wrong.
I went with due, fair, just and right as what I thought was the blue set, twas green.
I assumed come, down, heel and stay were dog commands that fit the yellow group.
Thus left, placed, put and set were the remaining words and the actual blue group.
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.
