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.
This phrase strongly suggests a financial setting, making it easy to lump with money-related clues. However, 'bank' here is a river edge, not a vault.
At first glance, this seems like a genre of crime fiction, hiding the fact that 'murder' is actually a term for a group of crows.
This nostalgic phrase immediately evokes classrooms and lunchboxes, but 'school' is also the collective name for a group of fish.
The words CHARM, CURSE, HEX, and SPELL are all magical incantations that form the start of these common phrases. The puzzle hides the mystical connection behind everyday terms like CHARM BRACELET and SPELL CHECKER.
MURDER, PACK, PRIDE, and SCHOOL are collective nouns for animals (crows, wolves, lions, fish). By pairing them with unrelated words, the animal reference is cleverly buried.
COPY, ECHO, MIRROR, and QUOTE each mean to repeat or duplicate. They appear as the first word in familiar expressions, masking their shared meaning.
BANK, BED, DELTA, and MOUTH are all parts of a river system. The puzzle pairs them with words that create strong alternative associations, such as BANK TELLER and MOUTH GUARD.
Wyna Liu constructs a diabolically uniform puzzle where every category follows the same 'starting with' pattern, forcing solvers to strip each phrase down to its first word. The brilliance is in the misdirection: each two-word phrase is so strongly idiomatic (like MOUTH GUARD or CURSE WORD) that the hidden initial word category becomes a blind spot. The river parts group, with BANK TELLER and DELTA AIRLINES, specifically exploits strong financial and travel associations, making it the day's toughest reveal. This puzzle illustrates how our brains automatically process compound phrases as single units, making it hard to isolate the opening term.
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.
