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.
A solver might group it with sounds, soda, or family terms, missing its role as a music genre suffix.
It seems like a tool or a flat surface, but here it belongs to a set of destruction verbs.
Often heard as the center of an apple or the earth, not immediately as a suffix for music subgenres like hardcore.
One might link it to math or complete sums, overlooking its slang meaning of wrecking a car completely.
These words all describe materials so light and thin that light passes right through them, like gauzy curtains or gossamer wings.
Each verb here is a way of putting thoughts into words, from formally stating a fact to simply voicing an opinion.
In the right context, these words mean to tear down or ruin something completely, whether you gut a building, level a wall, total a car, or trash a room.
The connection here is word endings: each is the second half of a music genre name, like the 'core' in hardcore or the 'wave' in new wave.
The puzzle's central trap is a false synonym cluster: SHEER, TOTAL, and UTTER all mean "complete," yet each belongs to a different group. Solvers who notice the overlap will chase a convincing fourth word and burn a guess before realizing the resemblance was bait. The purple category demands an equally hard pivot — POP, WAVE, STEP, and CORE only cohere as music-genre suffixes once a solver abandons each word's obvious primary meaning. LEVEL adds a second trap by arriving with a measuring tool's identity rather than a wrecker's, making the demolition group the last to 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.
