We present the phase diagram of clusters made of two, three and four coupled Anderson impurities. All three clusters share qualitatively similar phase diagrams that include Kondo screened and unscreened regimes separated by almost critical crossover regions reflecting the proximity to barely avoided critical points. This suggests the emergence of universal paradigms that apply to clusters of arbitrary size. We discuss how these crossover regions of the impurity models might affect the approach to the Mott transition within a cluster extension of dynamical mean field theory.