NYT Connections today hints and answers — Thursday, November 21 (#529)

Looking for today’s Connections answers? The Connections answers on November 21 for puzzle #529 scales down the difficulty compared to yesterday’s puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle’s difficulty at 3.3 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today’s answers. And if the hints aren’t enough, you’ll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we’re including a reflection on yesterday’s puzzle, #528, in case you’re reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #529. Only read on if you want to know today’s Connections answers.

Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.

Today’s Connections answer — hints to help you solve it

Unlike our guide to today’s Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, solving Connections relies on identifying connecting categories among 16 words. Each category’s difficulty level is represented by a color; yellow is the easiest grouping, and purple is the most challenging. Once you’ve made 4 mistakes in your guesses, the answers will be revealed, so hints can be helpful.

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

• 🟨 Yellow: Kinds of shirts
• 🟩 Green: Spheres in milk tea
• 🟦 Blue: Marine invertebrates, familiarly
• 🟪 Purple: Starts of pasta names

These hints should get you at least some of the way towards finding today’s Connections answers. If not, then you can read on for bigger clues; or, if you just want to know the answer, then scroll down further.

Here’s a larger hint: Get your favorite shirt on, pick up some milk tea, do but don’t consider SpongeBob, and more pasta.

Today’s Connections answers

So, what are today’s Connections answers for game #529?

Drumroll, please…

• 🟨 Kinds of shirts: Flannel, oxford, polo, tee
• 🟩 Sphere in milk tea: Boba, bubble, pearl, tapioca
• 🟦 Marine invertebrates, familiarly: Coral, jelly, sponge, star
• 🟪 Starts of pasta names: Fett, penn, torte, zit

This has to be the most trap heavy puzzle I’ve see in some time. There are so many different threads to pull on with this group of words. We got there though.

I went down the line with today’s puzzle.

Flannel and Oxford stuck out to me as types of shirts. Finding Polo and Tee helped close it up.

When I saw Boba, I was already thinking milk tea. Tapioca and pearl immediately jumped out to me but it took a moment for bubble to click. For some reason I wanted to force jelly here.

Maybe this was what they were thinking but for blue I was considering SpongeBob which is how I got sponge, star (of the Patrick variety), jelly and coral. Yes, they are all marine invertebrates, but I was going middle school here.

This is, I think (without looking), the second pasta reference I’ve seen this week as a purple category. Someone on the connections crew was hungry when they design groups for the week.

Anyway, today’s was the starts of pasta names with Fett(ucine), Penn(e), Torte(llini), and Zit(i).

Yesterday’s Connections answers

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #528, which had a difficulty rating of 2.8 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

After yesterday’s brief existential crisis, I decided to tackle today by solving the puzzle before hitting the words. Here’s how we got there.

At first glance, I saw snarl and howl. Immediately thought wolf sounds, followed by bark and bay. That’s the yellow set.

Stream and play stuck out to me next, run and air were natural finds for a budding broadcasting theme. Thus we had green.

I was focused on solving blue next to go down the line. Garnish and stir leaped out to me as part of making a cocktail. Muddle and strain were the only things that made sense from there. Check blue.

Which left the final four words: chain, ladder, pyramid and tree. In my mind they were corporate structure speak, which is close enough to organizational structures.

It was fun to try and solve without clicking, but it helped that today’s puzzle was easier than yesterday’s.