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 instantly as a spy-film surname, so it feels like it belongs with the movie titles. In fact it's the money word hiding behind the famous name.
A gambling word that also happens to be a real film title, so it pulls solvers toward both the cash-related set and the crime-cinema set at once.
Sounds like a plain everyday choice with nothing financial about it, which is exactly why it hides so well among the money terms.
A lone instrument with no musical partner anywhere on the board, so it looks unplaceable until the shared physical action becomes obvious.
BOND, FUTURE, OPTION and STOCK are all ordinary English words that moonlight as tradeable financial instruments — a debt that pays interest, a dated contract, a right to trade, and a share of ownership. Nothing exotic; the disguise is that each reads innocently on first pass.
ETCH A SKETCH, MARTINI, SPRAY PAINT and TAMBOURINE all demand the same vigorous motion — erase the drawing, mix the cocktail, blend the pigment, ring the jingles. The parenthetical title is a wink at the most famous shaken drink of all.
BUGSY, CASINO, DONNIE BRASCO and SCARFACE are all crime-and-mobster film titles from a classic Hollywood subgenre. Their shared tough-guy vocabulary overlaps neatly with the money words, which is precisely the misdirection.
DECENT, NOVELTY, OCTOPUSSY and SEPTUM each open with a three-letter calendar stub — DEC, NOV, OCT and SEP — buried under an unrelated word. OCTOPUSSY is the give-away; DECENT and SEPTUM are the ones that stay invisible for far too long.
Wyna Liu plants her decoys at the seams between groups: BOND and CASINO both read as crime-film material, tugging solvers toward the movie set, while FUTURE and OPTION pose as ordinary English. The month-abbreviation set is the structural showpiece, since the hidden calendar stub sits behind a completely unrelated word — OCTOPUSSY almost announces itself, whereas DECENT and SEPTUM stay silent. The green title's 'not stirred' wink rewards the attentive.
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.
