The NYT Connections puzzle for May 4, 2026, No. 1,058, leans hard on wordplay, especially in the purple group, which asks players to twist letters to find the links. The daily help content also walks through the four color groups, from overcooked meat to bubble tea ingredients and a set built around electric guitar moves.
The yellow group is all about qualities of overcooked meat: chewy, dry, stringy and tough. The next set is for players who want to play some electric guitar, with jam, noodle, shred and solo. The third group points to ingredients in bubble tea: boba, milk, sugar and tea. The purple group is the trickiest, tying together planets or a dwarf planet with the first letter changed: Bluto for Pluto, cars for Mars, Darth for Earth and genus for Venus.
The Times also points players to its Connections Bot, and registered players can follow their progress in the Times Games section. That tracker shows how many puzzles they have completed, along with win rate, perfect scores and win streak, a useful backdrop for anyone staring down a grid that rewards careful guessing more than speed.
That difficulty is not new. The piece notes a prior tough Connections puzzle listed as #5 among the hardest so far, a reminder that the game’s challenge often comes from how ordinary words can hide an entirely different pattern. On May 4, 2026, the puzzle’s payoff was in seeing the letters bend just enough to make the answer click.
For players who made it through No. 1,058, the answer is plain: the yellow set was chewy, dry, stringy and tough; the guitar set was jam, noodle, shred and solo; the bubble tea set was boba, milk, sugar and tea; and the purple set was Bluto, cars, Darth and genus.