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 doubles as the name for the written marks over letters, so solvers grab it as the key to the hidden-mark group instead of treating it as a plain synonym for a decorative extra.
Read as a bar or restaurant customer, it pulls attention straight toward drinking, which feels like a shortcut but is really a coincidence of the accent hidden inside it.
A flower, a color and a past-tense verb all at once, it looks like an ordinary word to dismiss rather than a beverage waiting to be accented.
Shaped like a determiner, it appears to belong with the pointing words, but it is actually a catch-all answer choice.
THAT, THESE, THIS and THOSE are the tiny closed class of pointing words English uses to sort near from far, singular from plural. They are the most common words on the board and therefore the least suspicious.
ACCENT, DETAIL, FLOURISH and TOUCH all name a small extra that makes a thing feel finished rather than merely functional. ACCENT does double duty here, quietly advertising the diacritic trick waiting in the hardest group.
AGREE, DISAGREE, NEUTRAL and OTHER are the standard clickable responses on approval scales and feedback forms. NEUTRAL and OTHER are the sneaky ones, since both read as ordinary adjectives outside a survey.
Put an acute accent back and CAFE, PATRON, ROSE and THE become café, patrón, rosé and thé — coffee, tequila, wine and tea. THE is the killer, an article nobody reads twice that turns into a drink.
Wyna Liu plants a false floor: ACCENT sits among plain-English synonyms for a decorative extra while quietly advertising the diacritic trick waiting in the hardest group. THE is the masterstroke — an article nobody reads twice that becomes a steeped drink with one mark. The four groups escalate from pure grammar to pure typography, so the puzzle quietly teaches its own logic.
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.
