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.
Car-culture vocabulary that reads like it belongs with the big rigs, pulling solvers toward a highway-themed guess that cannot hold all four.
A tire kept in the trunk is the first image, which makes it feel like highway hardware rather than a reserve.
Cosmetics jump to mind first, distracting from the more abstract sense the puzzle is after.
Shares its name with a famous historic warship, so it can read as a vessel and get dragged toward the freight group.
CONSTITUTION, FABRIC, MAKEUP and STRUCTURE are all ways of describing how something is put together. It is a gentle opener, though MAKEUP's cosmetics sense and CONSTITUTION's political ring keep it from being automatic.
BACKUP, EXTRA, REPLACEMENT and SPARE are four nouns for a duplicate kept in reserve. The group looks trivial until you notice how naturally these words also fit workshops, wardrobes and newsrooms.
FLATBED, PICKUP, SEMI and TANKER — the most concrete set on the board. It stays unsolved longer than it should because HOT ROD is sitting nearby pretending to be one of them.
HOT ROD finishes in ROD, OSIRIS in IRIS, TRAFFIC CONE in CONE and WOOLENS in LENS — four eye parts sealed inside unrelated nouns. The giveaway is that these four share nothing else at all.
The constructor buried the most concrete group in the blue slot, leaving three synonym-flavoured sets to blur together above it: MAKEUP, SPARE and EXTRA each plausibly answer two different questions. HOT ROD is planted as a fake truck for the eye-ending set to hide behind, so the board's most obvious category also becomes its best camouflage.
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.
