FOURPLAY

August 28, 2026 Puzzle Breakdown

Four groups, four words each — here's the connections between today's words.

We start off gently today with a simple bouquet of white flowers. While all of these blooms can naturally be found in other shades, their pristine white varieties are garden and wedding classics. If you spotted the botanical theme right out of the gate, consider this your easiest win of the day.

The second group today gathers four of the most recognizable faces from the Super Mario Bros franchise. Whether you were running through the Mushroom Kingdom as Mario and Luigi or dealing with the endless kidnapping dynamic between Peach and Bowser, this quartet should have felt immediately familiar. It is a straight-down-the-middle video game set with very little room for misinterpretation.

Culinary tradition and botanical reality rarely see eye to eye, which made this penultimate group a classic trap. While you would almost certainly find tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados, and eggplants in the produce aisle next to the greens, they all develop from the flower of a plant and contain seeds. Botanically speaking, they are pure fruit, no matter how much your salad dressing argues otherwise.

For today's hardest group, you needed to find the missing thoroughfare waiting at the end of each word. Whether you are avoiding blue shells on Rainbow Road, crossing the street with the Beatles on Abbey Road, trading ancient goods along the Silk Road, or rolling through the Thunder Road with Springsteen, every one of these leads straight to a road.