Looking for today's Connections answers? The Connections answers on November 10 for puzzle #518 are harder than yesterday's puzzle, with the Connections Companion rating this puzzle's difficulty at 3 out of 5.

Every day, we update this article with Connections hints and tips to help you find all 4 of today's answers. And if the hints aren't enough, you'll find all 4 answers below, with the category titles and the correlating words. Plus, we're including a reflection on yesterday's puzzle, #517, in case you're reading this in a different time zone.

Spoilers lie ahead for Connections #518. Only read on if you want to know today's Connections answers.

Alternatively, visit our how to play NYT Connections guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.

As reminder, the Tech Guild of the New York Times is on strike and have requested that people not play games on the NYT games app or online. They have created a strike edition website which has the same puzzles if you would prefer not to cross the picket line.

Unlike our guide to today's Wordle answer, where we recommend the best Wordle start words as your strategy, 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.

If you need hints to solve the groupings, then here are the themes of each, based on the order of difficulty:

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.

Here's a larger hint: Don't be too easily swayed or led astray, but if you fall off the beaten path, just remember that football season is almost here.

I came out swinging today by solving the purple category in no time flat. Saloon Doors and Pendulum just immediately screamed "things that swing" to me, so with that in mind I took a guess adding Golfer and, well, Swing to the mix and it paid off.

Next we swung to the opposite end of the difficulty spectrum with the yellow category with Cask, Cylinder, Drum, and Tank.

After that came green. At first I thought the connection related to herding and kept trying to shoehorn Cowboy in, but once I realized that was a dead end, it became obvious that Pilot, Shepherd, Steer, and Usher were all synonyms for guiding something.

That made the blue category today's rote fill with Cowboy, Jet, Ram, and Raven, which was lucky for me because I know next to nothing about football so I doubt I'd been able to get that on my own.

Reading this in a later time zone? Here are the Connections answers for game #517, which had a difficulty rating of 2 out of 5, according to the Connections Companion.

I was almost caught in the trap of slang with shred, gnarly, twisted and radical. I'm not sure why I didn't take the bait though.

Instead, I started yesterday's puzzle when I lick and trace which led back to shred and then ounce for tiny amounts.

Bath and throne were close to each other and I immediately added room to the end. It was quick work to find powder (room) and rest(room). All colloquialisms for the bathroom.

Gnarly and twisted got their time in the sun here by snagging bent and warped for the yellow category.

Thus, Algebra got the rote fill in with exponent, radical, power and root. Math is not a personal strong suit and I'm not sure I would have remembered that all those words are specific to algebra. So, I am happy to have it last.