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 sits one letter away from a country name that's also on the board, so solvers keep trying to slot it into the geography set.
It's a legitimate first name as well as a nation, so it pulls toward a name-based group while fitting the map group just as well.
It reads as both a common male given name and a verb for marking a surface, making two completely different groupings feel plausible.
It looks like a length measurement or a fragment of a longer word, so it rarely reads as a place name at first glance.
Four everyday words for the small damage that shows up on a well-used object. The set is friendly on purpose — but MARK and NICK also double as names, quietly seeding the puzzle's nastiest trap.
A pure geography set: four nations with no access to the sea, drawn from three different continents. CHAD and HUNGARY both pull double duty elsewhere on the board, which makes this group far harder to lock down than it looks.
Each entry is a European country with a single letter deleted: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hungary and Spain. HUNGRY is the cruelest of the four, sitting one character away from the identical country used in the green group.
Each answer opens with a synonym for fashionable — chic, cool, hip, smart — then carries on with unrelated letters. The prefixes hide inside longer words that seem to belong to food, history and wildlife instead.
This puzzle's craft lies in its overlapping decoys. NICK and MARK belong to both an imperfection set and a hidden names set, while HUNGARY appears as a geography answer and haunts its own truncated twin in the blue group — a deliberately cruel one-letter collision that punishes hasty grid-clearing. Adding CHAD as both nation and given name means almost every early guess can be right and wrong at once.
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.
