Connections
Puzzle #774
Quick and easy. Didn’t see a red herring.
The only context I know that word is in
broccoli rabe which is pronounced “rob”
Not in my dialect. It’s /rɑːb/ vs /ɹɒb/
Oh, I did. Almost cost me the game.
New York sports teams: Knick, Jet, Giant, Net
Ha, for once the parochialism is on my side!
Connections
Puzzle #774
It was a red herring completely of my own invention.
The red herring got me also but then I muscled through. I have heard some people don’t like Connections because sometimes it’s less a game and more getting into the head of the designer. This red herring felt like that. It was a legit answer.
Sure, but then there wouldn’t have been any way to apet the remaining 12 clues into three more groups. If you can find an alternate solution for all 16 clues, that might be a legit complaint.
I find the red herrings to be rather helpful. If I guess a group that looks rough, and don’t even get the “one away” message, that tells me it’s probably a deliberate red herring. That usually means those 4 clues are going to be in 4 different groups, so I start looking for alternate meanings for each and aee if that gives me ideas for what the groups are.
It wasn’t though, because you wouldn’t have been able to solve the rest of the puzzle. Getting four words to group is like getting one side of a Rubik’s Cube, it’s meaningless on its own.
I never heard of rabe and never would have guessed how it was pronounced.
Exactly. Part of the fun and challenge is when there are multiple plausible categories and you have to solve more of the puzzle in your head to figure out which categories work and which don’t. This is an intentional part of the game mechanic. There purposely are red herrings for this reason. It makes the game more than just a linear solve-category-A, solve-category-B, etc, experience. Some games do work out that way, and those are often painfully easy. It’s the trickier ones that I find more interesting.
Her original design for the puzzle was going to include a 17th word that didn’t fit anywhere in the puzzle. That would have been insanely hard.
Oh, that’s interesting. Doesn’t work as well graphically, but I guess you could do something like 3-4-3-4-3. Anyway, that might please me in the sense that the one thing I don’t really like about the game is that you only have to solve three categories, as the fourth is trivial then. The 17th would take care of that, but also add more solving complexity. I’d be curious to play a version like that.
One way I try to make the game more challenging is to pre solve and then try to assemble a reverse rainbow from hardest to easiest.
I do this to some extent. I just go purple hunting to start. You play enough of these and you can usually sniff out candidates. If I get purple first, then I try reverse rainbow, but I’ve been awfully bad at judging difficulty levels and often screw up
which I think is the next hardest category.
Connections
Puzzle #774
Man, starting out I saw three possible categories of which two had to be red herrings, as they shared a word in common with another possible category. Figuring out purple helped sort them. Actually, now that I look at it, only one was a real red herring. I could have sworn there was another clear one, but I must have dreamt it.
I don’t know if I still need to spoiler but, as in the phrase broccoli rabe, aka rapini. And it is pronounced “rob.” And I suspect the New Yorkers and other East Coasters will be much more familiar with it than the general American population as it’s a staple of Italian joints.
I have hit or miss success with this puzzle, but today’s was very easy.
Did you see the red herring at all? The New York sports teams. Because if you didn’t, you were lucky and that made it that much easier. I fortunately resisted the urge to just submit right when I saw it and realized soon something was afoot.
Connections
Puzzle #775
Easy-peasy, no notes.