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 hides inside MOUTHWASH on the same board, luring solvers to file it with the oral-care items instead of the garment-care verbs.
It reads like an edible substance, so solvers try to build a food or baking group around it rather than seeing it as a pattern found in cut timber.
Its cool, refreshing sensation invites a false pull toward the expressions group, while its herb meaning suggests plants and food rather than personal care.
As a noun it suggests media or journalism, and as a verb it hints at pushing or squeezing — nothing like the ironing-room sense the puzzle wants.
Four different delivery systems for the same job: a chewable, a flavoring, a rinse and a mist. The set is easy because the items are all found in the same drugstore aisle, yet they come in wildly different physical forms — solid, liquid, aerosol.
FOLD, PRESS, STARCH and WASH are all verbs that also work as nouns, and each describes a step in professional garment care rather than everyday cleaning. The narrow framing — a formal shirt at the cleaner's — is what locks the group in.
BURL, GRAIN, KNOTS and RINGS are all visible characteristics of timber, and the difficulty comes almost entirely from BURL, a woodworking term far rarer than the other three. It is the vocabulary gate between green and blue.
BEANS, CAT, CUCUMBER and CUSTOMER are meaningless alone — each only works as the tail of a stock phrase about composure. The word COOL never appears on the board, so solvers must supply it themselves, which is what makes this the puzzle's lateral leap.
Wyna Liu builds this puzzle on overlapping registers: verbs that happily double as nouns (FOLD, PRESS, WASH) and a literal-versus-idiomatic collision saved for last. MOUTHWASH planted beside WASH is the sharpest piece of misdirection. The four composure clichés only feel obvious in hindsight. It's a clean yellow-to-purple ramp, with BURL acting as the vocabulary gate.
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.
