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 as a percussion instrument, and sitting near JINGLE and FIDDLE it practically begs for a music grouping — but its true role is anatomical.
A classic layered dessert, so it looks like food company for TACO and PEPPER. It is really a verb about toying with something.
Ends in -ER and feels like an action, tempting solvers into the verb crowd of fiddling and meddling. It is actually the back half of a compound.
Sounds like geography and pairs naturally with water words like DIVING, hiding the fact that it is a passage inside the head.
Four verbs of idle, meddlesome interference — all of them slot naturally in front of 'with.' FIDDLE and TRIFLE each carry a tempting second life as a noun, which slows down what should be the easiest group.
ANVIL, CANAL, DRUM and STIRRUP are all ordinary objects that double as anatomy. The trick is that three of the four are everyday names for structures a solver rarely thinks about, while CANAL feels more like geography than biology.
DIVING, JINGLE, LIBERTY and TACO each need one short word appended to become a familiar phrase, landmark or brand. On its own the set looks like pure trivia; the real point is the missing word, which the puzzle then reuses.
BOTTOMS, JAR, PEPPER and TOWER take that exact same short word at the front instead. It is a mirror-image category — structurally elegant, and nearly impossible until the solver realizes two groups share a single hidden word in opposite positions.
Wyna Liu plants a rare structural gag: one hidden word, used twice, in opposite positions. The board's real trap is that neither half is solvable without noticing the other, so a solver who clears one blank-fill group gains nothing unless the pattern itself registers. Sprinkling DRUM, FIDDLE, PEPPER and TACO around the grid adds false food and music clusters, forcing repeated re-sorting before the symmetry finally snaps into place.
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.
