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 like one more verb meaning to place or position, so it tempts a false synonym pile — and the longer word hiding inside it can feel too obvious to trust.
Looks like a person's first name or a word for knowledge, so it reads as a lost word rather than a fragment of anything longer.
Could pass as a plain adjective or an old newspaper title, pulling solvers toward the print-puzzle thread instead of the music one.
The most noun-ish of the four verbs — a branch or a rod — so solvers may sort it with objects rather than with actions.
Four verbs that all mean to set something somewhere, with STICK as the sneaky one — it reads as a noun first, yet it works perfectly as a verb here.
The figures a tailor records to build a shirt: collar, torso, midsection and arm. Three of them double as body parts, which makes the clothing link feel almost too plain.
Four acts from a specific alternative-music moment, each normally traveling with a definite article. NATIONAL is the biggest stumble — bare, it reads like an adjective.
Four clipped openings of puzzle names you'd find printed in the paper. Once CROSS suddenly becomes crossword and SUD becomes something else entirely, the pattern snaps into focus.
Wyna Liu plants a quiet illusion: three body-part words sit beside SLEEVE, forcing solvers to decide whether the grid is anatomical or sartorial. The two wordplay groups escalate neatly — band names demand era knowledge plus a silent article, while the fragment group rewards anyone who notices a crossword and a number puzzle have been sawed in half. The hardest answer is hidden in the newspaper itself.
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.
