What’s weird is that I often have a really hard time with the puzzles that are rated easy. Every answer seems like a red herring and a lot of the times they include pop culture references that I miss.
Where do you find the difficulty ratings? Personally, I found this one about a 3 on a 1-5 scale. I hated that I didn’t see the purple right away. One of my purple candidate words was correct, but I wasn’t thinking about it right. I thought BUZZ might possibly be a purple, but all I could come up with was BUZZ cut, and my brain didn’t trip across BUZZ word and immediately abandoned that chain of thought. Saw the martini ingredients right away, but food and drink categories are in my wheelhouse. Unlike yoga from a few days ago (and I believe before).
Ah, found it. Today’s was a 2.5/5, according to the NYT Connections companion.
That’s the rating from the testers, but if you have a subscription, once you’ve completed a puzzle, you can click on Connections Bot which gives you the puzzle’s difficulty based on people’s performance. This rating can change over the course of the day. Currently, today’s puzzle is rated a 5/5. A lot of times the rating goes down, partly to a lot of non-Americans doing the puzzle in earlier timezones and they tend to miss American cultural references, spelling and pronunciation.
There’s a Connections Bot! I knew Wordle had a Wordle bot. Wait … let me see … Oh, holy shit. How have I never seen this before? It does say “New.” How long have I missed this?
Interesting. This one is a 5/5 based on that. Quite a bit different than the rating given by the Connections companion.
ETA: Ah, I see why it was so difficult today now. There were a good number of fake-outs/red-herrings/words-that-can-go-together. I was too dumb to see them all.
It’s been there a while, not sure how long. There’s all kinds of stats available there.
Did you know you can also play connections archive? Games going back to the very first.
Connections
Puzzle #770
I jumped right on the martini terms. 
I wonder what that says about me. 
I could have gone for a purple-first, but wasn’t too sure about LOAN, so I saved it for later. Had fun with this one.
The archive I know and have played back quite a while. Just never noticed the bot. Nor has my daughter who often plays with me.
According to the bot, that was the first category of 43% of solvers, so I guess great minds think alike.
Meanwhile I did Monday’s ahead of you all.
Puzzle #771
Connections
Puzzle #771
I thought blue was going to be a red herring and I had the answer for purple wrong.
Connections
Puzzle #771
I had to guess one item for blue - I knew the connection - but I guessed right so yay me.
Connections
Puzzle #771
I thought for sure I had a purple first. The rest seemed equally easy to me.
Wordle bot tells me purple was hella hard for most people In my defense, I was an English major with a concentration in poetry, so I just saw four obvious to me English concepts. I didn’t suss out the apostrophe connection.
Whereas I saw it right after I got Yellow. I got Blue last, because that wasn’t in my area of ‘expertise’.
Yeah I thought blue was going to be difficult for a lot of people particularly non-US Dopers, but it was just barely away from being the first category guessed according to Wordle bot.
Not a domain of which you are a master?
Exactly!
Connections
Puzzle #771
Win 110 in a row!
Tuesday’s puzzle done. Gotta say, a couple of the Purples mystify me.
Puzzle #772
Connections
Puzzle #772
I clearly had trouble with yellow. No problem with purple for me.
I kept including Temper in yellow. Also I disagree that Checkers is a pattern. Checks and Checkerboard are patterns.
Connections
Puzzle #772
Relatively easy. Another American-centric purple, though. I knew what the connection was going to be even though I don’t think I’d ever heard of the two very regional WHOOPIE and CHESS varieties