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.
A stage term through and through, it pulls the eye toward the performance words elsewhere on the board. Its real home is spelled out in its opening syllable, not its meaning.
Reads as a description of the other bread rolls rather than a name for one. Solvers keep trying to use it as a modifier instead of a standalone entry.
Feels like the filling that goes inside a roll, not a roll itself — and as a verb it means to show off, tugging it toward the action words.
Its noun sense (a building full of money) and its river sense both distract from the plain verb meaning, which is the one that actually fits.
BANK, SQUIRREL, STASH, STORE. Three are plain verbs for putting things aside, and then SQUIRREL stretches the set from action to instinct — the animal that hoards without ever opening an account.
CINNAMON, HAMBURGER, HOT DOG, STICKY. Four breads you order by name rather than describe. STICKY is the sneaky one, since it reads like an adjective for the others until you realize it's a roll in its own right.
DICHOTOMY, MONOLOGUE, TETRACYCLINE, TRIDENT. Each word wears its number in the opening syllables — one, two, three, four — buried so deep that most solvers never hear the counting.
CHOREOGRAPHY, MUSICAL, ORCHESTRATIONS, PLAY. Fill the blank and four Broadway craft categories appear. The catch is that all four already sound like theater words, so the phrase has to do the sorting.
Wyna Liu plants a theatrical decoy: MONOLOGUE belongs on a stage as much as PLAY and MUSICAL do, so the eye files them together long before the ear hears the prefix. STICKY pulls the same trick on the bread shelf, doubling as a modifier for CINNAMON. Purposefully, the four groups are built so the most obvious surface reading is never the correct one.
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.
