Players of NYT Connections faced a small trap in the types of mushrooms connections on July 20, 2026: TRUMPET, PORTOBELLO, BUTTON, and OYSTER all fit the same loose theme, but they were not kept together. Tim Mulkerin wrote that they belonged to different categories today.
His line was blunt: “TRUMPET, PORTOBELLO, BUTTON, and OYSTER may all be types of mushrooms, but they belong to different categories today.” The puzzle was Connections #1,135, and the split mattered because the game rewards grouping by the rule on the board, not by the first shared association a solver notices.
ANNOUNCE and THINGS TO CLICK
The yellow category was ANNOUNCE, with BLARE, HERALD, SOUND, and TRUMPET. That meant TRUMPET sat with words about making an announcement, not with the mushroom-like set a player might build in their head. The green category was THINGS TO CLICK: BUTTON, ICON, LINK, and MENU.
That left BUTTON and OYSTER as the mushroom-related holdouts. In a Connections puzzle, a word can look like it belongs somewhere obvious and still be pulled into a different pattern, so the safe move is to test every clue against the full set before locking in a group.
BUTTON and OYSTER in July
The blue category related to a word for a precious underwater gem, while the purple category was STARTING WITH ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES. Those two categories absorbed the remaining words, which is why the mushroom set never formed its own clean group in this puzzle. The structure, not the surface meaning of the words, controlled the answer.
For Players of NYT Connections, that is the practical lesson from July 20, 2026: a familiar word can mislead if it shares a theme with only part of the board. Mulkerin, a freelance writer, editor, and social media manager who has worked in digital media and the tech world since 2016, framed the puzzle around exactly that kind of split, and the full solve depended on reading past the mushroom association instead of stopping there.
