I have a teenage son. I hear him using slang when he talks to his friends. That really helps with puzzles like this!
Same. I got blue and yellow pretty quickly, but stared at the remaining eight boxes forever.
There is, apparently, a thing called a milk pot, so I tried NETI, PASTE, MILK, and SMOKE (heh). Nope.
Finally, in desperation, I thought, “I dunno, different viscosities of things?” and tried MILK, CREAM, PASTE, and SMOKE. When I got the “one away” message, I racked my brain to think of what three of those have in common, until it finally hit me.
Hardest I’ve ever had to work for a Connections puzzle.
Huh. I got it pretty easily. My one mistake was putting ILL in with the other yellow category slang.
I had to try today’s fitting red herring even though I knew it would be wrong. Was my only mistake.
Red was too obvious today. I spent my time solving saying this one goes there…].
Yeah, this one was scored as “Very Tricky” by the bot, but I think that was just because of the red herring, which I saw right through.
Only Purple gave me any pause, but after getting Yellow and Green it was easy enough to parse out.
I had a super easy time today. I had to go back to see what the red herring was and could only find three of the four. Not a fan obviously
In case you are wondering, it’s Darth, Solo, Chewy, Boba. But agreed, that was the only tricky thing about it.
Note that today both the crossword puzzle and Strands in the New York Times were Star Wars-themed so that red herring seemed to fit.
Also, today’s date.
The date is the reason for the themed puzzles.
Yeah, I know. It’s why it works. I don’t do the othe puzzles and got the connection to the date.
I didn’t do today’s yet, but have a streak of three purple firsts (unintentionally) going, so I’m rather nervous to try it. Got a two day “reverse rainbow” streak, too. I often find it weird which ones they consider purple. Many times I feel the blue is more difficult. The purples can be easy when they have obvious “out of place” words, and then you start doing things like completing a phrase, chopping off beginning and end bits, looking at middle bits, checking if there’s a rhyme or homophone, whether they can refer to bits of pop culture like movies or musicals, etc.
I’d say your purple strategy is on point. Even if I have purple last and I feel like guessing it, I look for the weird word and try the same things
I thought that today (7 May) was exceedingly easy. Purple was my last category, but I saw the relationship as I was clicking on the clues.
Danny OCEAN is a hero of an action movie franchise? That’s kind of a reach.
Yeah, I had to wrack my brain to figured out what they were going for there, but it was my last category, so I didn’t have to know to complete it.
I mean, it was last names of movie characters. I wasn’t worrying much about genres.
Should have guessed there’d be a mother-themed category today. Could have had purple first if I’d been looking for it.
I got purple first because MAY I could only be one thing, really.
Now I want to know if they’ve ever used The Five “D’s” of Dodgeball as a category or red herring.