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 weather and nothing like fast food. With WIND and HOT AIR sitting on the board, it's easy to build a whole wrong group around moving air.
It genuinely means to talk wildly, so it fits the empty-speech group almost perfectly — but the puzzle wants its other, more physical sense of boiling over.
Rising vapor is a close cousin to HOT AIR, so solvers often pair them and damage two groups at once before realizing the anger reading.
It works as both a weather word and slang for pointless talk; the weather reading tempts solvers to drag FLURRY and HOT AIR into the wrong set.
BOIL, FUME, RAVE and STEAM all describe reaching a furious boil — anger so intense it seems physical. RAVE is the sly one: it can mean ranting wildly, which is exactly why it also tempts solvers toward the empty-talk group.
BLATHER, GAS, HOT AIR and WIND are all slang or idioms for speech with no substance behind it. The group works because each word is already a physical thing — vapor, breeze, gas — repurposed to mean mere noise.
FLURRY, MUFFIN, NUGGETS and RIB only become menu items once the same two-letter prefix is attached: McFlurry, McMuffin, McNuggets, McRib. None of the four words contains that prefix itself, so the link stays invisible until you say them aloud.
ALIBIS, BALLOON, ESCROW and MOHAWK each end with the name of a bird — ibis, loon, crow, hawk — hiding across their final letters. ALIBIS is the sneakiest, since IBIS sits buried mid-syllable and almost nobody hears it.
The constructor's masterstroke is the RAVE and STEAM overlap: both belong to the anger set yet whisper toward the empty-speech set, forcing solvers to commit before they are sure. The prefix group is invisible until spoken aloud, since not one of its words contains its own brand. And the final trick buries bird names inside ordinary vocabulary — ALIBIS and ESCROW sound like paperwork, never wildlife.
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.
