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.
It sounds exactly like 'peak,' so it reads as mountain territory and pulls solvers toward the trek group. In fact it's a verb about stirring up someone's temper.
It holds liquid, so it feels like it belongs with the moisture-related entries on the board. It is really just ordinary gear for a long walk.
It contains 'wind,' which suggests the outdoors and movement, and it reads like a mechanical action. Its actual job here is purely emotional.
A mirrored sphere reads first as a party decoration or a piece of sports equipment. The mirroring is the only thing that matters.
The gimme group: four literal items a long-distance walker stuffs into a bag. Their ordinariness is the point — they anchor the board so the trickier verbal and structural groups stay findable.
Four verbs that all mean to provoke or inflame someone. INCENSE, NETTLE, and PIQUE are one idea dressed in three different registers, while WIND UP does it with a breezy two-word phrase.
Everything here puts a visible cloud into the air. Three are engineered devices and one is a natural phenomenon, and WATERFALL is the outlier that makes the set feel discovered rather than manufactured.
A structural set rather than a semantic one: each item contains at least one reflective surface. It's the puzzle's loosest link — a disco ball, a kaleidoscope, a dressing room, and a medicine cabinet have nothing in common except glass.
The constructor plants a false moisture theme: WATER BOTTLE, WATERFALL, HUMIDIFIER, DRY ICE, and FOG MACHINE all suggest one vapor group, forcing a split. Meanwhile ANGER hides behind familiar nouns — INCENSE and NETTLE read as objects, not verbs — and PIQUE doubles as a mountain homophone, luring trekkers. The purple set abandons wordplay entirely for pure object logic, an unusual choice that makes the reveal feel almost too simple.
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.
