Start with the spoiler-free hints. Go deeper only when you need to. Reveal answers on your own terms.
A direction for each group — no names given.
What kind of thinking each group asks for.
Pointed nudges on the words built to fool you.
Every Connections board plants a few decoys. Here are today’s, and why they pull you the wrong way.
Looks like a social gathering, so it tempts solvers toward live-event words. Its actual sense here is more formal: a legal participant.
Reads like an entertainer or musician, making the performance group look inviting. It really points to anyone engaged in a role or activity.
Seems like a generic positive adjective, which could pull it toward descriptor words. Instead it modifies a family relationship in this puzzle.
Visually suggests an action or movement rather than a relational term. Its family-specific use is easy to overlook until the group snaps into focus.
CONCERT, GIG, SET, and SHOW all describe live performance events, with SET working in the music-industry sense of a performer’s slot or playlist. The group is accessible but still has one card that feels more like an object than an event.
ACTOR, AGENT, PARTY, and PLAYER all identify someone or something taking part in an action, contract, or process. Their varied backgrounds—theater, law, sports—make the set harder than it first appears.
GRAND, GREAT, HALF, and STEP modify family terms to shift generational distance, shared ancestry, or legal relationship. They read like simple everyday words, which hides their precise genealogical role.
FROM NEANDER, HANDY, UPRIGHT, and WISE point to scientific names for ancient human species: Neanderthal, habilis, erectus, and sapiens. The purple category demands a leap from ordinary words to Latin and geographic origins.
Wyna Liu layered multiple parts of speech and registers: legal terms like PARTY and AGENT sit next to entertainment terms like SHOW and GIG, while family modifiers double as common adjectives like GRAND and GREAT. The purple set is especially clever—FROM NEANDER is not synonymous with the others but requires ignoring surface meanings to reach scientific nomenclature. This creates overlapping decoys in nearly every group.
a textbook decoy
requires lateral thinking
Solving the easiest group first reshapes how you read the entire board.
The editors reuse certain misdirection patterns. Learning to spot them saves guesses.
Purple is never what it first appears to be. Six structural patterns explain most of them.
Film titles, band names, and celebrity surnames hide in plain sight.
