How We Edit Connections

Wyna Liu

Wyna Liu has been editing puzzles at The Times since 2020.

Connections is a daily game about finding common threads between words. Players must select four groups of four words without making more than four mistakes. Connections beta opened on June 12.

A few months ago, a new assignment crossed my desk: Create the game boards for Connections, a category matching game that had recently been greenlighted and was in search of an editor. Most of my puzzle experience has been working with crosswords, and I was excited at the chance to try something different. How could writing crossword clues inform my approach, if at all? Much of my work as a crossword editor consists of formatting ideas and definitions into the peculiar and specific syntax of our house style, and this new game, with its stand-alone words, didn’t allow for the space I was accustomed to in order to express meaning. On the other hand, stretchy question-mark crossword clues are often based on the flexible interpretations of words, and those conventions would certainly come in handy. How could I apply my clue-writing experience to this pithier format?

I thought back on the Games magazine anthologies that my mom got for me when I was a child. The work of Robert Leighton, a cartoonist and puzzle maker, stood out to me. With the help of an answer key, I learned from his puzzles that a drawing of a tick, a thumbtack and a tow truck could be used to express the term “tic-tac-toe.” I also discovered that a picture of a telephone could be matched with a diamond ring, a visual pun on the sound a phone makes, and a bursting balloon could be paired with a soda can, since both go “POP!” Thinking about these puzzles reminded me of how meaning can be communicated succinctly, and I was inspired by their playfulness and use of free association.

With this in mind, I began keeping a notebook to jot down category ideas. (“I do not want to know what the inside of that notebook looks like,” said Joel Fagliano, senior puzzle editor, mini crossword constructor and, most important, my boss.) I put those ideas into a spreadsheet, which was more legible. There would have to be a mix of categories for the game to feel challenging and satisfying. That’s where the puzzle element could come in: Some categories might be defined by their use of wordplay — palindromes, homophones, adding or dropping letters and words — rather than the literal meanings of the words on the cards. I saw three areas of potential difficulty that could be adjusted: the familiarity of the words, the ambiguity of their categorization and the variety of the wordplay.

I organized my spreadsheet into four colors: ‌yellow, ‌green, ‌blue‌ and ‌purple, in spectral order. I wanted ‌yellow to be the most straightforward category, as a foothold for solvers. Purple was meant to be the trickiest category, a stand-alone puzzle incorporating a wordplay element. Green and ‌blue were sorted based on their inclusion of potentially unfamiliar terms or trivia. My task was to construct 60 boards with four categories each for the beta. With this method of organization, I thought I’d be able to grab one category from each color group to create a well-balanced game board. I quickly discovered I was wrong!

I saw that I rarely used groups from the blue column, since specialized vocabulary was so difficult to hide. For example, players might not be familiar with the diacritics DIERESIS, HACEK, MACRON and TILDE, but they might also instinctively know that those words belong‌ to a group without needing to know why. MACRON might belong in another group with “world leaders,” but the other terms are less ambiguous. What I thought was a challenging category was easier than I expected! Item overlap was a more effective way to make a board challenging than the use of trivia-based elements. I became aware of other visual hints, like entries that were too short or too long. Caution was needed when including items that might stand out in the grid, since they would invite immediate scrutiny.

My crossword brain seeks specificity and constraint, and the straightforward tasks of selecting four animals or flowers ‌typically send me down an internet rabbit hole. I tell myself that this makes the game tighter, but I may be overthinking it. Some categories didn’t make the list because I couldn’t think of four solid entries, like slang words for “car,” and words that could precede “sound” (“ultrasound” was one word; I didn’t want to have two proper nouns like “Puget” and “Norton” … but if they were all propers? Hmm … )

Other categories didn’t work because they contained too many unfamiliar proper nouns. An early board included a category based on trading card games (KEYFORGE, MAGIC, POKÉMON, YU-GI-OH). I suspected that not everyone would be familiar with each game, but thought they might deduce that they belonged together, as in the example of the diacritics. While that was still true, the feedback from testers was that the proper nouns threw them off, and they preferred more general categories.

I’ve enjoyed learning how puzzle editing plays out once a game is greenlighted, and seeing how our team fits into a larger ecosystem. When I joined this project, it had already been pitched and approved (we detailed this process for our last beta, Digits), and had gone through rounds of usability research and testing. Many of my initial questions were addressed through further testing, as well as workshops which helped shape my editorial approach:

• How many cards should make up each category and board? Should we include a decoy that doesn’t belong to any category?

• Why does the player have to submit the last category?

• What about the colors and difficulty ratings?

• How do we visually present the information that tells players what to do?

• How is feedback given during gameplay?

These are the kinds of questions I have always taken for granted working with crossword puzzles, where the conventions are already well established. One of the best parts of this process was working with other members of the Games team. I worked closely with Heidi Erwin, our brilliant digital puzzle designer, who patiently taught me about the myriad components that make up a game. While there’s a lot of overlap between what we consider a puzzle and a game, learning about their differences has been deeply helpful to my work on Connections.

Puzzle lovers can try Connections here.

A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2023, Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Connecting the Dots on the Making of a Game. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe