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 first as a car's rear compartment or an elephant's snout, so solvers file it under animals or vehicles before realizing it's simply a big lidded box.
The only food word on the board, it tempts solvers into building a grocery or pantry group that has no fourth member.
A nut, a tree, a color, and a common first name — the mundane familiarity is camouflage for the small weather word at its front.
It sounds like an abstract emotion rather than a product name, so it drifts toward a feelings category that never materializes.
Four containers for garments, ranging from a freestanding cabinet to a lidded box. It feels effortless — until you notice that two of the words also name body parts, planting doubt early.
A pure format category: these four items have nothing to do with one another except the long, narrow shape they're sold in. Anyone hunting for a topic instead of a shape will circle this group forever.
Four long-running designer fragrances, each recognizable by a single evocative word. It's a knowledge check — until the pattern clicks, these nouns read like emotions, substances, and nicknames.
Every answer is a legitimate word or name whose opening letters spell something that clouds the air. The four are deliberately mismatched in register — a surname, a given name, a title, a foreign loanword — so the hidden weather words stay invisible until you read slowly.
A textbook Wyna Liu construction: the hardest group's answers are all real words, so the padding letters feel like the point rather than camouflage. The middle tiers weaponize format over meaning — one asks how things are shaped, the next how they're branded. Meanwhile two of the easiest words quietly double as body parts, seeding doubt long before the weather words surface.
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.
