Today's Connections Hints and Answers for January 2, 2024 (Puzzle #571)

If you're struggling to time today's clock Connections puzzle, you will need some tips and tricks to finish it. Today felt a little harder than the last two days for me personallyalthough this is certainly not the universal experience. Each puzzle is probably difficult in different ways for different people, but if you also found this puzzle difficult like me, you can use the tips I presented to get the right answers.

If you're looking for a new puzzle that doesn't involve any frustrating wordplay, you might want to try NYT Tiles puzzle. It's a nice change of pace from other word puzzles, with a light-hearted puzzle to solve and several different layers to go through. It is mainly a matching game where you can pair tiles to create a long sequence and get a higher amount of points. And at the end you have a really cool celebration scene to help them out.

Today's Connections Category Tips

JANUARY 2 #571

If you need help with today's puzzle, I wouldn't blame you as I would appreciate a little help too. There are words in this puzzle that don't seem to make sense or go together, and other words that seem like they should go together but don't. Several times I thought I had a correct answer and I didn't even get a “one away” when it failed. So here are several tips to help you:

• A category is about whether or not you can see something
• A category is about the way something sounds, especially if it's syncopated
• A category is about things that come in similar quantity
• A category consists of four words that come after another word in a sentence - that word is an animal

If you want more help with today's puzzle, you will look to find the names of the categories. If you need more help than that, full spoilers are below.

	TO PERCEIVE
	CADENCE
	ONE IN A GROUP OF TWELVE
	PUPPY ___

Today's Connections Answers

JANUARY 2 #571

Yellow Answers: Revealed and Explained

I was close to this category and had several guesses that involved two or more of these words. I ended up moving on and never went back to it, but TAG and METER were other words that I considered to be here. At the time, I was focused on NOTICE and REGISTRATION and those words alone put me more in the mindset of something official than seeing something. I was close, but not close enough in this case, which is true for most of this puzzle.

Green Answers: Revealed and Explained

There was a similar story for this category, as I had BEAT and RHYTHM together, but figuring out the other two words became more difficult. TIME has been added, but I used CLOCK as my guess for this one instead of METER. With some other unfortunate assumptions, I stayed close, but not close enough. It was a sad day to lose my streak, but I hope my mistakes help you get the right answers. I feel a little silly for not putting METER here now, as I have enough years of music lessons to know better.

Blue Answers: Revealed and Explained

This one I don't think I would have accomplished on my own, but again I was only halfway there. I had MONTH and INCH grouped with CLOCK and TIME at one point, but obviously that wasn't right. I also thought METER might belong here since these are all measurements. I was wrong about what this category was and that turned out to be a fatal mistake. DONUT and JUROR confused me in this puzzlesince I had no idea why they belonged here.

Purple Answers: Revealed and Explained

This last category is difficult to assemble. TAG was something I had considered elsewhere. PADDLE was also something I originally thought might go with RHYTHM, but I ruled it out before wasting it on a guess. I also had DAYS with the other amounts of time at one pointso that was another reason why this category was so hard to solve for me. It's a strange assortment of words and it would be difficult to put them together without more context.

Other games like connections

If you want try a different word-based puzzleThere's plenty more waiting for you in the box below.