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.
It suggests a horror monster, so you might expect it to join a group of scary things, not a drinks menu.
It’s a powerful storm, leading solvers to think of natural disasters rather than a cocktail.
This word immediately evokes medicine or drugs, not something you’d sip on a beach.
These words are all synonyms for continuing or enduring, with LINGER suggesting a slow fade and LAST implying endurance over time.
From the simple ODE to the intricate VILLANELLE, each term here is a recognized poetic form, testing your literary knowledge.
Despite their alarming names, HURRICANE, PAINKILLER, SCORPION, and ZOMBIE are all classic cocktails, perfect for a beachside sip.
Each word combines with 'sweet' to create a familiar phrase: sweet dreams, sweet nothings, sweet pea, and sweet spot.
This puzzle plays with a clever misdirection by loading Blue with words that sound dangerous—hurricanes, zombies, scorpions—luring solvers into a false category. The Green and Yellow groups provide accessible footholds, while Purple’s fill-in-the-blank with 'sweet' demands a lateral leap. The inclusion of VILLANELLE adds a dash of highbrow vocabulary, balancing the everyday words like STAY and PEA.
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.
