Today's puzzle gets a unique look with a red-and-beige checkerboard design.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for August 19 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,165. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,164, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.
Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.
What is Connections
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.
Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers so you can keep your Connections streak going. And if the clues aren't enough, you'll find all four answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words.
Today's Connections answer — hints to help you solve it
Today's Connection Grid and Words
- Picnic
- Basket
- Breeze
- Ants
- Blanket
- Cocoa
- Pickle
- Foot
- Snap
- Base
- Mask
- Seoul
- Obscure
- Rheo
- Cinch
- Hide
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Easy breezy
- 🟩 Green: Opaque
- 🟦 Blue: Play
- 🟪 Purple: Pixar-fare
Today's Connections Group Hints
If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:
- 🟨 Yellow: Piece of cake
- 🟩 Green: Conceal
- 🟦 Blue: Words before "ball" in sport names
- 🟪 Purple: Homophones of CGI-animated films
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.
Today's Connections answers
The Connections answers on August 19 for puzzle #1,165 are way easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Piece of cake: Breeze, cinch, picnic, snap
- 🟩 Conceal: Blanket, hide, mask, obscure
- 🟦 Words before "ball" in sport names: Base, basket, foot, pickle
- 🟪 Homophones of CGI-animated films: Ants, cocoa, rheo, seoul
On the whole, I didn't find making the connections difficult but I did find the red highlighted blocks surprisingly distracting.
Obscure was my word to start today's puzzle. I used that to find mask, then hide and it took a moment to find blanket but we got there.
Pickleball is how I got to the next set with football, basketball and baseball.
I wasn't totally sure about the purple set at the beginning because of Ants, but I tried it now with Coco (cocoa), Rheo (Rio), Seoul (Soul) and Antz.
Which left the cake for dessert in breeze, cinch, picnic and snap.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Seen at a movie premiere: Limousine, paparazzi, red carpet, velvet rope
- 🟩 PJs: Petroleum jelly, poetic justice, practical joke, private jet
- 🟦 Things that are orange: Basketball, orangutan, sweet potato, traffic cone
- 🟪 Things that are gritty: Cowboy coffee, film noir, flyers mascot, sandpaper
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,164, which had a difficulty rating of 2.3 out of 5.
I took like three strikes in a row where I refused to not put the Flyers mascot in the orange set. Anyway, eventually I pulled my head out and slotted in basketball, orangutan, sweet potato and traffic cone.
Solving the Gritty problem got me to the Flyers mascot, sandpaper, cowboy coffee and, after a moment, film noir.
The PJs stuck out at this point, so I put together poetic justice, practical joke, private jet and petroleum jelly.
This left limousine, paparazzi, red carpet and velvet rope as my final four at the movies.
