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 royalty and sits comfortably beside any ruler-themed guess, so solvers rarely look past the crown.
Suggests printed cotton, and near dressier words it feels like a clothing theme rather than a coat pattern.
Pure confection on the surface, it tempts a sweets grouping — masking that its real hook is the banded colors.
Vintage office equipment vibes pull solvers toward a machines grouping that never actually exists on this board.
Four receptacles and stations that exist for one purpose: taking loose change. The charm is the range — a machine, a phone, a toy and a folk tradition all filed under the same small ritual.
A habitat, a species, a color scheme and a gait, all pointing at the same flightless bird. EMPEROR is the sneaky one, since it reads as royalty until you picture the animal.
Each entry is the closing word of a familiar typeface: Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Franklin Gothic, American Typewriter. All four stand alone as ordinary words, so nothing looks missing until you try adding a first name.
Less a color group than a counting group: CALICO cats, CANDY CORN, NEAPOLITAN ice cream and TRAFFIC LIGHT all present exactly three hues. Hiding behind 'colorful' rather than 'color' is what makes it easy to chase the wrong kind of connection.
The editor buries the coin group in ordinariness, then lets the color set pass as a food-themed decoy by pairing CANDY CORN with NEAPOLITAN. The font group is the real craft: four suffixes that read as standalone words until you notice each begs a missing first word. CALICO and TUXEDO look like a fabric-and-formalwear pair, quietly seeding doubt.
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.
