The Connections Puzzlemaker Welcomes Your Hate

One morning earlier this month, I slammed my laptop shut. I was four cups of coffee deep and full of rage. My hands shook, and my vision blurred. It wasn’t politics, my usual subject matter, that had sent me spiraling.

It was Wyna Liu.

Liu is the New York Times editor who makes Connections, the online puzzle that is both the blessing and the bane of my mornings—and the days of millions of other people who regularly spend time tangling with Liu’s creation. Connections, which was released in 2023 by the Times’ Games team, is the second-most-popular Times game after Wordle. The puzzle is all about identifying words that share a common thread, which can be very satisfying. Often, though, that common thread is so thin as to be invisible. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle made of riddles. Think crossword, but evil.

One recent board—which is how Liu refers to an individual puzzle—contained the words eventually, later, next, and soon, which could be filed together under the category “At Some Future Point.” Fine, good, easy enough. But in the same puzzle, another category— “What the Outstretched Index and Middle Fingers Can Represent”—included the words peace, scissors, two, and victory. Woof. In just the past few weeks, Connections players have faced such baffling categories as “Words That Seem Longer Written Than Spoken”; “Church of England Wedding Vow Verbs”; and “Starts of Pasta Names.” Yet we soldier on.

Most mornings, I can solve Connections eventually. But roughly once a week, I find myself stuck, unable to decipher Liu’s secret code. She becomes my enemy. And I am not alone. People are simultaneously addicted to Liu’s game and perpetually angry with her. Online, it is fashionable to be extremely dramatic about this. “Connections deserves the death penalty,” one X user posted in October. “Unfortunately I believe the person in charge of nyt connections is suffering from that stage of syphilis where it starts eating your brain :/” another wrote. Once, after being stumped by Liu’s daily puzzle, the Saturday Night Live comedian Bowen Yang drove by the Times office building in Manhattan, flipped it off, and posted a picture on Instagram.

All of this inspired me to reach out to Liu. I wanted to ask the puzzlemaker my most pressing Connections questions. Namely, who does she think she is? But also: Does she know that her game has us all in a chokehold? Does she hear our rage? The short answer is yes, Liu knows. And she relishes it. (On Monday, Liu’s puzzle contained a sneaky reference to Yang.)

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Elaine Godfrey: So, Wyna. How did you start making Connections? Is there a puzzle school you graduated from?

Wyna Liu: I came into puzzles through crosswords. I started just avidly solving them maybe 15 years ago, and I got very into it. Then I started going to tournaments. I’m not a good solver. I compete in the loosest sense of the word, but that’s where you meet the people who make and edit the puzzles. The cool thing about puzzles is that there’s not a straightforward trajectory to it—there's no puzzle school. You just get to it by being a fan.

I joined the Times in 2020 as a crossword editor. Connections was pitched during a Game Jam, which is this annual event where people on the Games team get together and pitch ideas. It was pitched by a couple of my colleagues—one is an engineer, and one’s in audience research. The green-light committee decided that they wanted to try it as a public beta for 60 days. They needed to assign an editor to write the daily boards, and I was the only editor that didn’t have a game. I got really lucky.

Godfrey: Tell me how you make a Connections board.

Liu: There’s a lot of free association, a lot of Google. I keep a notebook, and notes in my Notes app. I make the game in Google Sheets so you can click and drag the words around. You just kind of start to riff off of them. Okay, what could this mean? What could that mean? You just start word-cloud thinking about different meanings of the same word. Maybe there’s three or four different options for what the word bow could mean. Bow could be something you tie, a bow could be part of a violin, a bow could be part of a ship, or it could be a bow, a gesture of respect.

So you spin off a couple of categories, and then it’s a lot of massaging together. It’s a lot of trial and error for me, dead ends. When it does come together, it feels very satisfying.

[Read: What do crossword puzzles really test?]

Godfrey: If I asked you to make a board right now, how long would it take?

Liu: It would be a super boring call. [Laughs.] On average, it takes maybe two and a half hours. At this point, I have a lot more experience doing it, so I feel more comfortable. Sometimes I really want to have a board where all the words are movie titles, or all the words begin with the same letter. That might take a little bit longer.

Godfrey: Do you make a bunch of them and then bank them for later?

Liu: Yeah, I will make a batch of seven boards a week, and I’ll deliver them to my editor, Joel Fagliano, who makes the Mini crossword, and is the lead editor on our team. He’ll test them, give me his notes, I will make any changes if necessary, and then send them off to our testing panel. So I am submitting boards that will be published in about a month.

Godfrey: A testing panel! How does that work?

Liu: We have some internal testers who work for the Times, and some of the people who participated in the Times’ Crosswords fellowship program are testers. They get a form every week with the boards that asks questions like “On a scale from one to five, how hard was this puzzle? Did the color difficulty match with your experience? Any flags or alternate solutions?”

I find that difficulty can be subjective. Sometimes everyone’s going to be like,This was a four out of five; it was really hard. But sometimes a board will get the whole range of scores.

Godfrey: There are four colors for the boards: purple, blue, green, and yellow. They correspond to levels of difficulty, right? How do you determine those?

Liu: Purple is the wordplay category. The four words in that group are not defined by their literal meanings. It’s words that end with ___ or homophones or something. Blue is trivia that is maybe a bit more specialized, not just definitions. Maybe it’s all movies or certain bands. Sometimes that’s the hardest one. Yellow and green are other category types: They might be four things you bring to the beach, or sometimes they’re all synonyms for the same word. I would say that yellow is the most straightforward.

At first, I thought, Could we have fake cards that don’t belong in any category? I had all these ideas I proposed. I made these other test boards. But I think the original designers were right. I like the game as it is.

Godfrey: Oh God, if there were red-herring words … I’d never get it done. I’ve been reading the subreddit for Connections. Some users say they do it all in their head first and then start solving, because that way, you can rule out being tricked by some other category. I can’t do that; my brain doesn’t work that way. But is there a way you’re supposed to do Connections?

Liu: No! It’s very cool that there’s a sort of meta game element where people have different constraints that they put on themselves, different ways they like to do it. I love hearing that. The game works best when it’s just solved your own way. People sometimes ask, Can I look stuff up? Is that cheating? And I’m like, yeah, look stuff up! Why not? Anything that helps you enjoy the experience of the game is not only fair, but good. The game should be in service of the solver.

Godfrey: People have such strong reactions to this game. Did you expect that?

Liu: The whole thing was a surprise. It was exciting that people really like talking about the game. Puzzles are cool in that people are very passionate about them, but they’re also low-stakes. It’s fun to be mad. I love being mad at stuff, so I get it.

My parents are older and extremely offline. So once, when they were like, Your cousins are talking about it!, that was meaningful.

[Read: Please don’t ask me to play your board game]

Godfrey: I know people who get so mad at this game. Some of my colleagues wanted to know if you have some sort of quota for fill-in-the-blank categories, because they would really like you to stop doing them.

Liu: Well, to your colleagues, I’m sorry. [Laughs.] But yeah, I’ve definitely heard some feelings about some of the weirder categories. That’s fair.

Godfrey: Did you see that Bowen Yang flipped off the New York Times building once because he was so mad at your puzzle?

Liu: What an honor. I love that. It’s amazing, and he’s amazing.

Godfrey: Do you get Connections hate mail?

Liu: Most of the discourse is people saying stuff like, Who do you think you are? And You’ll pay for this! That’s all great. I take it in the spirit that it was meant. I remember seeing one video online that was captioned “The Connections Writers room,” and it was someone just taking shots and presenting ideas. [Laughs.] I don’t drink! There have certainly been times where the intention is to be hurtful. I try to not take it too personally.

Godfrey: What other games do you like?

Liu: This is a little embarrassing, but I’m not good at games. Anything that involves strategy in any way, anything where there’s a randomness element, where you roll a dice, or a card game where it’s the luck of the draw—you don’t know what you’re gonna draw, and then you have to make decisions—to me, that is the most baffling thing. I just don’t understand how to do it.

But I love Codenames. Even though it’s competitive, it has this collaborative spirit. I love party games like Fishbowl. Sudoku—I feel like I was 15 years too late, but it feels like a very peaceful state for my brain. I love word puzzles, but I interact with them so much for work, it’s nice to have something else. Cryptic crosswords are really fun.

Godfrey: Do you ever think, Okay, I actually don’t want to do any more wordplay?

Liu: [Laughs.] I have a standing call to solve a cryptic crossword with my friend on the West Coast. That’s very fun. But yeah, usually my way to unwind is to watch horror movies. I’lI go to crossword tournaments, but I do save a lot of my puzzling for special occasions. I don’t want to burn out on puzzles.