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.
Reads first as a superlative adjective, nudging solvers to pair it with other words about quality instead of hearing the verb hiding underneath.
Its most familiar use is the sign-off at the bottom of a letter, so it seems to belong with other polite formulas rather than with verbs of obedience.
Feels like a toast, a goodbye or a word of encouragement — a social expression that looks out of place beside sharper, more serious words.
Instantly reads as a polite formula and appears to cluster with the other conversational pleasantries, disguising how ordinary the word really is.
Four verbs meaning to obey or pay heed to something. The clever part is that two of them double as nouns — MINDS and RESPECTS — so they feel heavier and stranger than the simple idea they express.
Four ways of saying you came out ahead of someone. It is the board's calmest group, but BEST and TOP sit right next to a cluster of sign-off words, which is exactly the confusion the constructor wants.
Three cheers, the Three Stooges, three strikes and three wishes. Only the second half of each phrase is on the board, so the missing words stay invisible until you say these aloud with their partners.
AUTOCRUISE, FOOLHARDY, MULHOLLAND and THANKS each finish on the surname of a famous Tom — Cruise, Hardy, Holland and Hanks. The words read as ordinary vocabulary until you chop them in the right place.
Wyna Liu stacks two straight synonym sets in yellow and green, letting the board feel gentler than it is, then puts the real labour in the bottom rows. Blue inverts the usual pattern by asking for a missing first word, while purple splits four ordinary-looking entries to release surnames. The misdirection lives at the seams, not in obscure trivia.
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.
