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 like a plain upscale adjective, so it pulls solvers straight toward BOUGIE, FANCY, POSH and SWANK — an alternative four that looks completely valid but is not the intended set.
An everyday adverb in phrases like 'rather warm,' so the eye files it as a function word instead of a surname belonging to a famous person.
Most solvers meet this word first as a tax or a verb meaning to impose one, which hides that it is also a surname with a matching given name.
Famous as a season, a jump and a water source, so it can look like the odd word out even though it is a genuine mechanism component.
BOUGIE, FANCY, POSH and SWANK are all informal ways of saying something is expensive and stylish. The sting is that CLASSY nearly fits here too, so solvers often build a five-word pile before backing off.
ESCAPEMENT, PENDULUM, RATCHET and SPRING are the working innards of a traditional mechanical timepiece. RATCHET and SPRING double as ordinary words in other senses, which keeps the group from feeling like pure jargon.
AYKROYD, LEVY, RATHER and SAVAGE are the surnames of four well-known Dans. The misdirection is that RATHER, SAVAGE and LEVY read as everyday vocabulary first, so the shared given name stays hidden.
BORDER, CLASSY, FOAMILY and GENIUS each conceal a biological classification term with one letter inserted: order, class, family and genus. Because FOAMILY is invented and GENIUS and CLASSY are real words, the odd spelling is easy to skim past.
The constructor's cleverest move is planting CLASSY as a fifth upscale adjective, so the easiest group arrives with a built-in decoy that must be rejected. Meanwhile the surnames in the Dan set double as common words, keeping pop culture disguised as vocabulary. The purple group inverts the usual trick: instead of adding letters to ordinary words, it stretches scientific jargon into real English, rewarding solvers who scan spelling rather than meaning.
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.
