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.
Likely to be viewed as a greenhouse or music school; its role as a Clue room is a specific piece of trivia.
Reads as a geographical location, diverting attention from the hidden character at the end.
Looks like a straightforward financial term, not an unlikely hiding place for a children’s TV puppet.
The iconic rooms from the murder-mystery board game Clue (Cluedo): Conservatory, Hall, Kitchen, and Study. Players move through these spaces to gather clues. This group is a nod to pop-culture nostalgia.
Terms for high school or college sports stars: All-American honors, Jock as slang, Letterman for earning a varsity letter, and Team Captain as a leadership role. The grouping is a straightforward list of accolades, but JOCK might feel out of place among formal titles.
Each word pairs with ‘Twist’ to make a familiar phrase: French twist (hairstyle), Lemon twist (cocktail garnish), Oliver Twist (Dickens orphan), and Plot twist (narrative device). The variety of domains—hair, drinks, literature, film—creates a satisfying ‘aha!’ once the pattern clicks.
Bernie ends with Ernie, Colbert with Bert, Discount with Count, and San Anselmo with Elmo. The hidden Muppets are a delightful surprise and reward careful scrutiny of the word endings, making this a classic purple-category brain-teaser.
Wyna Liu constructs two fill-in-the-blank categories today: the familiar “___ TWIST” and a deeply hidden character-embedding trick. The word SAN ANSELMO is a masterstroke of misdirection—its geographical veneer distracts from the Elmo at its tail. Mixing high-school sports jargon with a Dickens orphan and a cocktail garnish creates juicy cross-contamination, while the Clue rooms anchor the puzzle in board-game nostalgia. The purple category’s ‘ending in…’ mechanism is exceptionally subtle, rewarding pattern-finders who look beyond surface meaning.
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.
