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.
Reads instantly as a promotional clip, luring solvers toward the attention-and-publicity words. It actually only works once a short word is placed in front of it.
Has a strong movie-marketing meaning that seems to fit the media cluster, yet here it's a physical object being hauled.
Belongs to a small water-themed decoy alongside WAVES and WATER SKIER, which tempts a false ocean grouping before the screen-habit set emerges.
Sounds like ocean scenery or a hand gesture, so it pulls toward the water words rather than sitting quietly as the second half of a compound.
Four easy, near-interchangeable verbs for idle time on a device. The group is deliberately plain — no trick, no twist — and it exists mostly to give solvers a fast foothold before the decoys start pulling.
Four abstract nouns for the amount of public notice something receives. The overlap with the promotional sense of TEASER and TRAILER is the puzzle's sharpest bait, since those two words feel like they belong right here.
A barge, a trailer, a glider and a water skier all get dragged along behind something else — but the category hides a person among three objects, which is what keeps it from being obvious.
Each entry is a complete, innocent word on its own; only when a short missing word is placed in front do the familiar compounds appear. Classic fill-in-the-blank misdirection, since nothing on the board signals a word is missing.
The constructor plants two decoy clusters that never quite close: the promotional flavor of TEASER and TRAILER points at publicity, while SURF, WAVES and WATER SKIER suggest an aquatic set. The fill-in-the-blank group is elegant because every entry stands alone innocently — absence is the mechanism. The towed group quietly slips a human in among three objects, a small structural joke.
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.
