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.
Read as a noun, it sounds like the material that explicit and graphic descriptors apply to, so it pulls hard toward the ratings words. Its actual role is the mood meaning nobody reaches for first.
It opens a famous warning label phrase, which makes it feel like it belongs beside the notice-and-caution words. The real link is buried in its spelling, not its associations.
It reads as pure communication, so solvers file it with words about notices and content. Its true partner is a physical object, not an idea.
It looks like a surname or brand name, tempting solvers to sort it with other proper-noun-feeling entries instead of staring at its letters.
Four adjectives pointing at the same untroubled state of mind. CONTENT is the sneakiest of the four: read as a noun, it seems to belong with the ratings vocabulary instead.
The descriptors that show up alongside viewer-discretion warnings — words used to flag material meant for adults. They look like plain intensifiers, which is exactly why STRONG and GRAPHIC feel slippery.
Four things one flat object can be: something that only advises, something you play a strategy game on, something you press fabric on, and something you pin a note to. The odd one out is ADVISORY, an adjective among three nouns.
RENT, LEASE, HIRE and LOAN — verbs for getting something for a while — hide at the tail of four otherwise unrelated words. SAPPHIRE and SLOAN are the cruelest: a gemstone and a surname that both end in a transaction.
Wyna Liu plants a single blink here: two separate sets of adjectives — one for temperament, one for explicit material — feel like the same family until you realize they never mix. The flat-object set deliberately mixes an adjective with a game, a chore, and a noun, so no part of speech anchors it. Best of all, the buried-verb group disguises itself behind a gemstone and a surname, hiding its logic in the final letters.
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.
