Wyna Liu’s Nov. 12, 2026 NYT Connections puzzle turned the Doc Brown Marty McFly flux capacitor idea into a trap for solvers. The grid of 16 words included familiar-looking movie references, but the cleanest guess was not always the right one.
Wyna Liu and No. 1,250
CNET said NYT Connections No. 1,250 landed on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026 with four groups of four words, and the puzzle’s design leaned hard on misdirection. Liu, the Times puzzle editor, chooses words that can fit in multiple groups, which is why a grid can look obvious before it starts to unravel.
The point for players is mechanical, not cinematic: you are not matching titles to titles, you are sorting 16 words into four answer sets. Once the wrong association takes hold, the puzzle can feel self-reinforcing, because several entries are built to sit comfortably in more than one category.
Back to the Future red herrings
The Back to the Future layer stood out because the puzzle included Doc Brown and Marty McFly, plus change purse, flux capacitor, shift dress and swing set in one set of four answers. That combination made the grid look like it was signaling the film right from the start.
CNET also said Rocky and Gladiator jumped out as possible movie titles, and that guess put the writer halfway to solving the purple group. The actual purple set was gladiator sandals, Marty McFly, Moonlight Sonata and rocky road, with the hint “The envelope, please.”
That is the practical trick in a Connections grid: a familiar phrase can be a red herring, while an unrelated word may belong to the real set. Here, the obvious movie reading was part of the design, not a shortcut around it.
Four groups, four answers
The blue group pointed to ending in ways to cook things, with Arctic char, comedy roast, Doc Brown and you’re toast. The yellow group was built from good heavens, great Scott, holy smokes and Jiminy Cricket, a set that rewards players who spot exclamations rather than themes.
For solvers using the published hints and answers, the useful move is to treat every word as provisional until it survives three other possible groupings. That is especially true in a puzzle where one word can look like a film reference, a phrase fragment, or part of a completely different category at once.
For No. 1,250, the answer key mattered because the grid used the Back to the Future surface level as bait. The better read was to test each word against the categories, not against the movie memory it first triggered.
