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.
Reads as food, luring solvers toward a grocery-themed set with GRAPE-NUTS, SWEETBREAD and CAMPBELL'S SOUP CAN. It is purely figurative, about status rather than snacks.
The animal inside the phrase pulls toward DUCK DUCK GOOSE, LEAPFROG and MANTIS SHRIMP, even though the meaning is entirely about human hierarchy.
The music word invites pairing with ENGLISH HORN, and the phrase sits near THE SCREAM's arty fame — but this one belongs with playground games.
Sounds like dessert or pastry, so it tempts a food grouping. It is actually savory organ meat, which is exactly the point of the trick.
A warm-up built on shared memory: recess and party games nearly everyone learned before they could read. No wordplay, no misdirection — just instant recognition and a gentle ramp before the abstraction arrives.
Four idioms for the one with authority, each a food or animal metaphor doing the same job. The work here is realizing all four are one concept in four costumes rather than members of a themed list.
A knowledge check that flips the puzzle from vocabulary to images. The set spans American regionalism, Pop art, post-impressionism and expressionism, a deliberately wide net that still lands on instantly nameable works.
The cleverest group: every name has two halves and neither half describes the thing. GRAPE-NUTS and SWEETBREAD sound edible, MANTIS SHRIMP and ENGLISH HORN sound animal and musical — so each label doubles as its own decoy.
The constructor plants a literal-description trap in plain sight. Yellow and Green are pure recognition tests, so early wins feel safe — then Blue shifts from language to images, and Purple weaponizes naming itself with labels whose halves contradict their contents. Pairing culinary-sounding misnomers with animal-sounding ones makes the crossover trap unusually convincing. It is a backward-looking puzzle: nostalgia, then art history, then a quiet lesson in taxonomy.
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.
