Today's puzzle is all about like-minded play that pops.
Find our guide to New York Times Connections answers and hints for July 18 below.
Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #1,133. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.
Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #1,132, 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
- Travel
- Fly
- Quiz
- Score
- Opinion
- Carry
- Health
- Tart
- Culture
- Mind
- Time
- Goaltend
- View
- Lives
- Double dribble
- Attitude
We have the Connections categories below, but here's a hint without the actual titles. Try this out:
- 🟨 Yellow: Court fouls
- 🟩 Green: Collective ideas
- 🟦 Blue: Game over
- 🟪 Purple: Not your parents' soda
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: Commit a basketball violation
- 🟩 Green: Belief
- 🟦 Blue: Things tracked in video games
- 🟪 Purple: Words after 'pop'
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 18 for puzzle #1,133 are a lot easier than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 1.8 out of 5.
- 🟨 Commit a basketball violation: Carry, double dribble, goaltend, travel
- 🟩 Belief: Attitude, mind, opinion, view
- 🟦 Things tracked in video games: Health, lives, score, time
- 🟪 Words after 'pop': Culture, fly, quiz, tart
I'm honestly surprised I got today's yellow category off the bat, because I'm not a big sports ball person. But I've played enough NBA 2K to recognize carry, double dribble, and travel, and while I didn't know what goaltend was, with the word 'goal' in it, I figured it had to go along with the rest.
From there I spotted a quartet of like-minded synonyms for green: attitude, mind, opinion, and view.
I'm a huge gamer, so it was easy enough to spot the link between health, lives, and score. It took me a second to realize I could throw time in there too to solve blue.
That left purple as today's rote fill with culture, fly, quiz, and tart.
Yesterday's Connections answers
- 🟨 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
Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #1,132, which had a difficulty rating of 3 out of 5.
Yesterday'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.
