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 an emotional bond, so it tugs hard toward the warmer, feeling-flavored words. Its actual role is far more mundane.
It pairs naturally with another word on the board and carries a soulful, emotional charge, making it look like a misfit among machinery names.
It could be a hobby, a financial stake, or plain inquisitiveness — anything but what the puzzle intends, which makes it feel like the stray word.
It looks like a typo for a travel word, so many solvers dismiss it before ever saying it out loud.
Four soft-focus words for the early, unspoken stage of liking someone. The mischief is that ATTACHMENT and SPIRIT feel like they belong here too, so the group looks larger than it actually is.
A tidy functional set: the four slots anyone fills in or checks before hitting send. These words are so ordinary that solvers tend to skim past them while hunting for something cleverer.
Four grand, aspirational nouns that double as spacecraft names — a classic move where lofty vocabulary turns out to be machinery. SPIRIT and OPPORTUNITY being a matched pair makes the set feel almost like a riddle.
Read aloud, each word becomes something else entirely: a course, a road, a route, a way. The spelling is deliberately working against the sound, so the group only snaps into place once the other three are gone.
The editor scatters the vocabulary of feeling across three groups — attraction, interest, spirit, attachment — so the board keeps offering false warmth. Meanwhile the plainest words, the email parts, sit in plain sight and get dismissed as too easy. The purple set is a pure sound trick disguised behind ordinary spelling, and the rover names were picked for their abstract, non-technical ring.
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.
