‘Connections’ December 18: Hints and Answers for Puzzle #556

The New York Times‘ daily word game has become a huge hit since it launched in June 2023.

But it is in New York City, Chicago, Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, Seattle, Los Angeles, Toronto, Philadelphia and Minneapolis where Connections is a really big hit.

It is edited by Wyna Liu, the Times‘ puzzle editor, who shared her tips for playing.

“My best piece of advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing,” Liu told Newsweek earlier in 2024. “You may see the board and have completely identified the category, seeing five words that could belong in that category.

“Don’t try to guess the four words in that category, because even though you know what the fifth member is, you won’t know which of the four it might not be,” which would ultimately waste a turn.

Instructions on how to play the game are below. Clues and the answers for Wednesday’s puzzle are toward the end of the article, so scroll with caution.

How to Play Connections

The brainteaser tasks players with grouping 16 words into four categories based on association. For example, a recent game linked the words “clear,” “earn,” “make” and “net,” which all came under the category “take home, as income.”

Each of the four categories is labeled with a color, which also signifies their difficulty level. Yellow is the easiest category, followed by green, blue and purple. However, the puzzles are rarely straightforward, using homophones and wordplay, among other techniques, to keep things interesting.

The uniting themes can come from a broad range of categories—anything from Quentin Tarantino films to geometric terms.

If all four words are correctly placed into each set, those words will be removed from the board. Each incorrect guess counts toward the mistake tally. Up to four errors can be made before it’s game over.

Players can shuffle and rearrange the board if they want to try to make the process of guessing the connections easier. To make things a bit tougher, a word can sometimes belong to more than one category—but there is only one correct answer.