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.
Ends in WALK and seems to fit a natural group with the other WALK words, but it actually lives in the fashion domain.
Another WALK word that could lure solvers into a phantom group, yet it belongs to a different category altogether.
Its WALK ending and striped pattern make it a double agent, potentially misdirecting toward both the walk and the fashion themes.
The fourth WALK decoy; it looks like a thematic match with the others but relies on a completely hidden mechanism.
These are all iconic spaces from the classic board game Monopoly: high-rent Boardwalk, the unavoidable Income Tax, the railroad Short Line, and the utility Water Works.
A runway (catwalk), a seasonal line of clothing (collection), the visionary behind it (designer), and the person who showcases it (model) are the four pillars of any fashion presentation.
From a barber’s pole spiraling with color to the numbered stripes on a billiard ball, and from magnetic strips on credit cards to painted crosswalks, all share a bold striped identity.
Each word ends with the name of a horse’s gait: DECANTER (-canter), ENVELOPE (-lope), FIREWALK (-walk), and FOXTROT (-trot). The meaning of the word itself is a red herring.
This puzzle’s masterstroke is scattering four WALK-ending words—CATWALK, BOARDWALK, CROSSWALK, FIREWALK—across all four categories, setting a perfect phantom group. The purple category layers an additional homophone trick, hiding horse gaits in plain sight at word endings. FOXTROT further teases by evoking dance, adding a subtle second misdirection. The constructor forces solvers to abandon the obvious pattern before the true connections click.
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.
