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 soft novelty hand reads like a toy, so it pulls hard toward the spring-loaded objects even though its real connection is the gesture it makes.
Sounds like exactly the kind of gag-shop novelty that bounces, wobbles or springs, and it sits in the scrambled-letter set instead.
A prank prop strongly associated with Halloween, which makes it feel like it belongs with the costume items rather than the coiled objects.
A joke garment that reads as dress-up gear, tempting solvers to file it with the cape and face paint instead of the pointing images.
Cape, face paint, fake blood and fangs are the accessories that turn anyone into a classic vampire. It's the friendliest group on the board — every word names something you can picture instantly, so the only work is realizing they belong to one character rather than four separate spooky things.
A bobblehead, a pogo stick, a can of fake snakes and a trampoline all rely on a coiled metal spring to wobble, bounce or launch you. The slash in the title is the wink: spring the mechanism, not the season.
The Creation of Adam, a foam finger, an 'I'm with stupid' shirt and Uncle Sam are all defined by a hand or arm gesturing at something. Notice how different the gesture is in each: divine, celebratory, insulting, accusatory.
Beer hat, breathe, herb tea and The Bear all use the same seven letters — B, E, E, H, A, R, T. Spacing is the disguise: two-word phrases read as objects or titles, so the eye never bothers to sort the letters.
Wyna Liu builds four groups that all feel physical — clothes, toys, gestures, phrases — so the board reads as a cabinet of objects rather than wordplay. The cleverest move is the final set: multi-word phrases with spaces that look like themed nouns while hiding scrambled versions of one another. The foil is a novelty-item lure, several entries dangling the same worn-or-bounced energy to tempt a false fifth group.
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.
