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.
Its food meaning is an immediate decoy, hiding the possibility that it starts a court sport.
The outdoor meal reading feels concrete, pulling attention away from its more idiomatic use.
It looks like a picnic supply or a physical covering before it reads as an action verb.
A world capital seems like a geography answer, but the spoken name is what actually matters.
The title itself is an idiom, and all four members — BREEZE, CINCH, PICNIC, SNAP — are casual, slightly playful ways to say something is very easy. The challenge is only that PICNIC and SNAP also have common literal meanings.
These are all verbs meaning to cover or keep from view: BLANKET, HIDE, MASK, OBSCURE. BLANKET is the trickiest because many solvers first see it as a bed covering rather than an action.
Each entry is the first part of a sport name ending in 'ball': BASE, BASKET, FOOT, PICKLE. PICKLE is the intended speed bump, since it is much better known as a food than a court sport.
The words are homophones of CGI-animated films: ANTS sounds like Antz, COCOA like Coco, RHEO like Rio, and SEOUL like Soul. The set is designed to look unrelated until you stop reading and start listening.
Wyna Liu layers familiar categories with decoys: a picnic-and-blanket surface image briefly suggests outdoor leisure, while PICKLE hides behind food. The purple set is especially smart because its entries look like random nouns and proper nouns until the homophone mechanism collapses them into recognizable animated films. It’s a clean four-tier reveal that rewards both vocabulary and phonetic flexibility.
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.
