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 reads as a pink wine served in a stemmed glass and sits right beside a spirits-themed group. Here it is simply a garden bloom.
Botanically it names a flower cluster and casually it means an athletic shoe, so it pulls toward two groups before settling into one.
A sea anemone is an animal, not a plant. That double life makes it look like it belongs with creatures rather than blooms.
It looks like a musician's booking or a stint of work — nothing remotely drinkable. Only the last letter gives it away.
Four silhouettes of the same shoe: a low slim one, a chunky raised sole, a thin stiletto, and a sole thick at the back and thin at the front. Each word lives a busy life elsewhere, which is exactly why the group slides by.
Two are everyday garden names, two are showier botanical words. ANEMONE doubles as a sea creature, tugging solvers toward an animal group that never materializes.
A shape category rather than a meaning one: every item is round at the top and pointed at the bottom. PEAR and RAINDROP are intuitive; UVULA and SPEEDBAG demand real visualization.
Swap each final letter and a spirit appears: BRANDO to brandy, GIG to gin, RUN to rum, WHISKER to whiskey. Recognizing the words as almost-drinks is the entire trick.
Wyna Liu builds a clean difficulty ladder: shoe styles, plants, silhouettes, then a sound-swap finale. The craft sits in decoys like ROSE, which reads as wine, and SPIKE, which reads as botany, blurring the plant and beverage groups. ANEMONE adds a sea-creature red herring. Unusually, the purple group's targets are everyday spirits rather than one obscure shared suffix, keeping the aha broad.
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.
