FOURSURE
October 21, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown
Four groups, four words each — here's the connections between today's words.
How everyone did today
The simpsons
Marge, Lisa, Bart, Homer
No trickery here to start off the puzzle, just television royalty. These four make up the core nuclear unit of Springfield's most famous cartoon family, minus baby Maggie. If this took you more than a few seconds to spot, you might want to spend a little more time in front of the television.
Percussion
Drumset, Xylophone, Triangle, Timpani
Everything here makes noise primarily by being struck, tapped, or banged on with varying degrees of musicality. Whether it was the pitch-perfect resonance of timpani and xylophone or the elementary clinking of a triangle alongside a full drumset, these were all drawn straight from the percussion section. It sat at the lower-middle tier today—just noisy enough to spot early, assuming you didn't overthink the geometric decoy.
Famous Epics
Iliad, Aeneid, Odyssey, Divine Comedy
Homer gave you two of them, Virgil provided the sequel nobody asked for, and Dante took a detour through the underworld to round things out. These four are the granddaddy texts of western literature, clocking in at thousands of lines of verse apiece. Landing at the tricky end of the spectrum today, it asked you to look past the usual Trojan war associations and remember that poetry used to come in marathon lengths.
Things with Keys
Piano, Keychain, Laptop, Maps
As the hardest set today, this one relies on a single word pulling far too much semantic weight. A piano and a laptop have the kinds of keys you press, a keychain holds the kinds you turn, and maps rely on the kind that explains what the little symbols mean. If you got stuck hunting for musical instruments or travel accessories, the misdirection did its job.
Why these four groups
What makes this board sing is the tension between high culture and everyday objects, anchored by two brilliant decoys. Piano desperately wants to march into the percussion section alongside Drumset and Timpani, while Homer casts a mischievous shadow over the classical realm of Iliad and Odyssey. Yet the difficulty curve holds firm: the yellow group remains an unshakeable cartoon baseline, and Homer is too tightly tethered to Marge and Bart to stray. That leaves the instruments to safely resolve, leaving the delightfully lateral concept of things with keys—spanning from Laptop to Maps—as the hard-won finale.