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 among butchered horror titles and sounds like a review quote for a scary film, so it reads as part of that set rather than casual small talk.
Most solvers treat it as one specific breed, not one of the official classification groups, which keeps the whole set from clicking.
A short, playful word that seems to belong with childhood or leisure, and it also reads as a description of a small pet rather than a show-ring category.
It doubles as a greeting, which pulls it toward the small-talk phrases and away from the flat floor coverings it actually belongs with.
Four low-effort, socially safe answers to a question nobody really wants a full answer to. MANAGING and CHILLING are the modern shrugs, while NOT BAD and SAME OLD are the classics — the group works because all four sound like something said while already walking away.
A tidy compound-word set: each entry simply attaches to the same flat floor covering. The cleverness is in the range — sacred, athletic, martial and domestic — so the four feel unrelated until the shared second half appears.
Four official show-ring classifications rather than breeds themselves, which is exactly the trap: solvers hunt for dog names and find none. TOY and HOUND are the sneaky ones, since both read as ordinary words until you realize they are categories, not examples.
Each entry is a famous scary film with its final letter swapped, producing a word that still looks pronounceable. HOSTED, JAWN and PSYCHS are all legitimate-looking words, so the wrongness is easy to feel but hard to name — HALLOWEEK is the one that finally gives the game away.
Placing CHILLING beside four butchered horror titles plants a false mood before a single group is found. The two taxonomy sets reward the same instinct while punishing overreach, since TOY and HOUND both read as ordinary nouns. Purple is the craftiest: three fakes are legitimate words, so only HALLOWEEK's pun signals anything is wrong.
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.
