The April 13, 2026 edition of NYT Connections, puzzle No. 1,037, put four TV show title surnames together in one category: House, Lasso, Montana and Soprano. The set gave solvers the kind of late-game snap that makes the game a daily habit and a daily trap.
The completed grid also included categories built around things seen outside a theater, accessories for a magician and items that can have caps. In the theater set, the answers were box office, marquee, ticket line and velvet rope. The magician set included cape, handkerchief, magic wand and rabbit, while the cap category brought together baseball player, camera lens, mushroom and pen.
The surname category fit the puzzle’s trickier purple tier, the one that the puzzle-hints writeup flagged as especially hard. That is where the title lasso montana soprano lived in spirit: not in the answer list itself, but in the kind of clue-set that forces solvers to see the title names hiding inside familiar words. It was a neat finish for a grid that mixed straightforward visual cues with a more slippery pop-culture callback.
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For players who got there, the solution was clean. For everyone else, the April 13 board asked the same thing Connections always does: can you see the pattern before the game tells you what it is?
