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 opens with the same letters as BLU-RAY and BLUEGRASS, which tempts solvers into hunting for a prefix pattern that doesn't actually exist. It's really sitting in a completely different category.
It reads like something you ride, nudging solvers toward the ride-related group, but its real qualification is a flat, circular shape that has nothing to do with amusement parks.
A derby is also a hat and a shoe, so it looks like a plain physical object that could join the round-things group. Instead it points at a specific sporting event tied to one location.
The 'BLU' opening creates a false family with two other answers, and its shiny disc silhouette makes it easy to misplace. It only needs one quality: being round and flat.
A Blu-ray, a coaster, a sand dollar and a tortilla share nothing except silhouette — all four are circular and lie flat. That is the whole trick: pure shape, spread across wildly unrelated parts of daily life.
Bluegrass music, bourbon, the Derby and fried chicken are the Bluegrass State's best-known cultural exports. Nothing overlaps with the other groups, which makes this a satisfying click once the state finally lands.
Blade, Near Dark, Sinners and Twilight all belong to the fanged corner of horror. Pairing blockbuster familiarity with cult obscurity makes this the group that separates casual viewers from film buffs.
Hover, skate, snow and surf each take the same suffix to form vehicles and sports equipment. The mechanism is simple, so the difficulty is placement: you keep hunting for wordplay and overlook the obvious compound.
Wyna Liu plants a BL- illusion — BLU-RAY, BLUEGRASS, BLADE — dangling a prefix group that never materializes, so solvers burn guesses early. The yellow set is deliberately cross-domain, leaping from media to beach to kitchen to bar, letting shape click only late. Putting the gentlest mechanism, one repeated suffix, in the purple slot inverts the usual difficulty curve.
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.
