Today's Connections Hints & Answers For January 01, 2024 (Puzzle #570)

It’s a brand new year and with it came a brand new Connections puzzle. Today’s puzzle is a nice one to start out with and at a sort of middle ground difficulty-wise. It’s good to start out with a streak in the new year, so you may need a few clues to help you start the year off on a good foot. Luckily, there is not much you have to worry about with this puzzle, and with just a few clues you’ll be off to the races.

If you are looking for a different puzzle to try this year, the NYT Mini Crossword puzzle is a fun game that takes the best parts of the traditional newspaper puzzle and condenses them into something smaller. It’s short and sweet, with the right amount of challenge to get the brain going without taking a good part of the day to finish. There are plenty of other puzzle options out there, but this is one that won’t take a ton of time and gives you that pleased feeling when it’s finished.

Today's Connections Category Hints

JANUARY 01 #570

The categories today have an interesting mix, and some of the words could easily be confused and end up somewhere else. However, some of the other words are fun and go with the theme of the holiday. It can give you conflicting feelings and that can make it hard to solve the puzzle. However, a few clues can be all it takes to change that.

• One category is about a group of creatures that share a common feature
• One category is about things that can light up the sky
• One category is about things that are all associated with one place in particular
• One category is about four words that all end with a different word that shares a common meaning

If you want a little more help on today’s puzzle, there are more ways we can give that to you. We will start with the category names and then the full spoilers.

Today's Connections Answers

JANUARY 01 #570

Yellow Answers: Revealed & Explained

This category was fairly easy and kind of funny once I realized what was going on. EARTHWORM is unique enough to catch my attention very quickly, and I saw SALAMANDER soon after. SLUG was fairly easy to add in as well, but for some reason, my brain just didn’t see the word EEL for a minute. Once it did, I was able to put the whole thing together and move on to the next category. This was a fun category, in my opinion, and I was pleased with how that one went.

Green Answers: Revealed & Explained

I also really liked this category, and I thought it was apt for the day of the year. It’s very reminiscent of the bright lights and fireworks we use to celebrate. I saw FIREFLY and GLOWSTICK, and that was the first part that clued me in. I began looking for other things that might glow, and AURORA was an easy include. It took me a moment to connect the dots on RADIUM but not long at all. It was nice to think of all the beautiful colors before getting into the harder part of the puzzle.

Blue Answers: Revealed & Explained

I actually got this one last as I was able to get the purple category first. There were a lot of water-related words in the last part of the puzzle, and figuring out whether they went together or not was a challenge. However, once I eliminated that guess, I had to figure out what the other connection was. I saw that there were 5 obvious compound words, and knowing how these puzzles usually work, I pursued that idea first. Then I was left with this to finish it off.

Purple Answers: Revealed & Explained

I knew I had to eliminate 1 word from the list of compound words. I was trying to figure out what the common denominator was. The end of the words caught my attention more than the beginning of them, so I was focusing more on that than anything else. I noticed “drop” and “fall” first, and of them, the only word that didn’t fit that same idea was “mill”, so I eliminated WINDMILL and guessed the rest, which was luckily correct.

Other Games Like Connections

If you want to spend your day off relaxing, check out the puzzles in the box below to see which one might strike your fancy.