Today's puzzle is all about tightening up language like a pro.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for July 17 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,132. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,131, 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
- Cardinal Directions
- Classical Elements
- Crane Game
- Epilogue
- Farewell
- Last Dance
- Pinball
- Plot Spoiler
- Robin Hood
- Satires
- Seasons
- Suits
- Swan Song
- Tickets
- Tokens
- Tree Trunk
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Epic finish
- 🟩 Green: Coin-op
- 🟦 Blue: Connect ____
- 🟪 Purple: Fast & Furious
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: Grand Finale
- 🟩 Green: Seen in an Arcade
- 🟦 Blue: Four Groups of Four
- 🟪 Purple: Ending in Parts of a Car
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 July 17 for puzzle #1,132 are a bit harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3 out of 5.
- 🟨 Grand Finale: Epilogue, Farewell, Last Dance, Swan Song
- 🟩 Seen in an Arcade: Crane Game, Pinball, Tickets, Tokens
- 🟦 Four Groups of Four: Cardinal Directions, Classical Elements, Seasons, Suits
- 🟪 Ending in Parts of a Car: Plot Spoiler, Robin Hood, Satires, Tree Trunk
Today's Connections felt really easy to start with, as I locked in on the yellow and green without using any incorrect guesses.
But then I hit a wall on the blue and purple, using all but one of my mistakes before kind of lucking my way into the solution for purple (as you can see in the screenshot, I went out of order today).
What's funny is, I got purple not by connecting the car parts, but by actually thinking of things that steal from others (Robin Hood steals from the rich, Plot Spoiler steals the joy of viewing from the person watching something, and Satires steal from the thing they're parodying sometimes, and Tree Trunks steal nutrients from the other plants around them). I was wrong, but also right, since those were the answers.
From there, I put the last four together to solve blue.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 Skincare Products: Clay Mask, Eye Cream, Peel, Toner
- 🟩 Shades of Black: Charcoal, Ink, Jet, Pitch
- 🟦 Associated With Precision: Bullseye, Clockwork, Laser, Needle
- 🟪 Starting With Tiny Marks: Dot Matrix, Period Piece, Point Break, Spot Remover
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,130, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5.
Today's Connections puzzle is a good one, offering a good balance of challenge and creativity. I definitely struggled a little with it at first, but once I found my rhythm, I was able to solve it fairly quickly.
I went in order, figuring out the skin care products and knocking yellow off the list.
It took me a bit to figure out green, and I made a couple of incorrect guesses before locking in on the correct answers and realizing that everything here was related to darkness (or shades of black, as it turned out).
From there, blue came together pretty quickly on accuracy-related matters. Next, I just had to put the pieces together and use the process of elimination to get purple.
