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 split-second glimmer or sudden insight, which is exactly the faint-signal flavor of another set of words on the board.
Sports commentators use it for a swing that misses completely, so it looks like a natural sibling of the racket-sport actions.
Its everyday sense of supplying food overlaps with another verb that means roughly the same thing, tempting a wrong pairing.
A vague, generic noun that feels like filler, yet it becomes a name people recognize once a small word is placed in front of it.
FLICKER, TRACE, WHIFF and SUGGESTION all name something only faintly indicated rather than stated outright. FLICKER and WHIFF also work as sensory words, which softens the set and stops it from feeling like a plain synonym list.
SERVE, SLICE, SMASH and VOLLEY are all ways of striking the ball, and several of them also live in other sports. The category only locks in once all four are read as one racket game's vocabulary.
Add a definite article and FLASH, HULK, PUNISHER and THING turn into costumed names. THING is the outlier: a bare, ordinary noun that only sounds heroic once that little prefix is attached.
FEED, FIERY, FOMENT and FUMBLE each open with a syllable borrowed from the giant's chant in a famous fairy tale. The four words share no meaning at all — only a chant-shaped beginning that hides inside ordinary vocabulary.
The constructor hides a fairy-tale chant inside completely ordinary vocabulary, so FEED, FIERY, FOMENT and FUMBLE read as plausible filler until the opening syllables are sounded aloud. Two crossover lures — FLASH tempting the faint-glimmer words, WHIFF's sporting ring — keep solvers reshuffling tiles between plausible sets. Unusually, even the easiest category leans on nuance rather than trivia, so difficulty climbs steadily instead of front-loading a wall.
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.
