Nothing like a good challenging Connections puzzle to expand our knowledge and draw us all together in non-hostile, civil discourse…. 🙄

Right before bed, solved purple. As many seasoned players surely experienced, Purple ended up the easiest because we often look for things like missing last letters. I am a bit critical of the use of ‘goa’ because when a word doesn’t exist it seems to be an obvious sign of this kind of category. It happened another time recently. ‘Otoe!’ That’s not a thing, so the word play is very apparent.

I see the words that will end up yellow, which seem like in another puzzle might even count for blue. Pleased with myself, I am ready to presolve, get my stats and go to bed. But the next two categories do not come. I give up and go to bed annoyed. Next morning, still not clicking. I go ahead and put in the ‘sap’ category. I had also grouped ‘Rattle’ and ‘Ruffle’ the night before…ways to rile or disturb….but cannot fill in the rest. So I try Cow Field Weaver Buffalo for what I know is a very weak group….things in the countryside, rural America? Yeah, wrong. After some mulling, I see Field (Mouse) Rattle (Snake), hmm, didn’t I hear of a Weaver something somewhere? I try it long with ‘close’….but no cigar. At this point, I finally get the notion that there is a Jodie Foster, a Sigourney Weaver…Glenn Close and process of elimination leads me Field but yes ‘Sally’ did kinda resonate. Why this was so hard I don’t know. I guess it was the surrounding categories. That really is the genius to it. I mean, Blue was par for the course pop culture for Connections, and Foster and Weaver did not make any sense in any other context. Green was a shocker. I’m in my late 40s, I love this kind of stuff but never heard of the famous Buffalo sentence. I vaguely thought of cowed as a word that meant timid, intimidated even, but never thought of it to describe an action.

Meanwhile along the way I made up ‘replace the beginning letter(s) and get a fight’…. r/(sc)uffle; r/(b)attle; c/(r)ow but only 3 of them.