Connections — find the four casts

Sixteen actors are shuffled on the board. They belong to four films — four actors each. Your job: work out which four starred together, one film at a time, with a shared "overall connection" actor lurking behind all four films as a bonus puzzle.

How to play

1. Select four actors you believe shared a film and submit.
2. Right: the group locks in with its film revealed. Wrong: you lose one of your four allowed mistakes — and if three of your four were together, you'll be told you were "one away".
3. After a wrong submit, tiles that did share a film light up in matching colours, so every miss still teaches you something.
4. Solve all four groups, then try the bonus: name the actor who appears in all four films but isn't on the board.

Hints and difficulty

Pick two or three actors you're confident about and press the hint button: you'll get a film one of the missing group members starred in — deduction, not a handout. Easy allows two such clues per group and, if you're still stuck, a reveal that costs a mistake; Medium allows one clue; Hard and Expert give you nothing but your wits. Each difficulty is its own daily puzzle.

Tips

Don't anchor on the two most famous faces — puzzle films are chosen so that stars scatter across groups. Instead look for the character actors: they usually pin a film precisely. And before submitting, sanity-check the era; four actors who were never working in the same decade rarely share a film.