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By Shannon Power
Pop Culture & Entertainment Reporter
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One of the brains behind hit daily word game, Connections, has shared her thoughts on how to be a successful player.
Wyna Liu is a crossword editor at The New York Times who was asked to develop Connections. The daily puzzle was borne out of a brainstorming session in 2021 by NYT colleagues in order to create new games for its app and website.
From there, Liu was tasked with getting together what would become known as Connections ready for the world to play. That day came on June 12, 2023, when its beta version was released online.
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As it celebrates its first year, Liu reflected on Connections' success, including becoming the second-most played game on NYT after the global phenomenon, Wordle.
"The response has been really incredible and overwhelming, and unexpected," Liu told Newsweek.
"It's exciting that something I care very deeply about is resonating with people."
Connections is played by finding a common theme from a 16-word table. There are four words in each of the four themes, but some words can belong to more than one group.
Each theme is separated into a color from yellow, blue, green and purple, each reflecting a different level of difficulty. Players get four chances to make a mistake before losing the game.
"The game has evolved with the solvers, and responds to solvers' experience and expectations," she explained, pointing out how she now sometimes "clusters" words on the board together that may trick people into thinking they don't belong together at all.
Liu builds the seven daily games every week herself from ideas she sources through her daily life experiences. She keeps a tidy spreadsheet with her theme or word ideas, but a notebook is never far away for when inspiration may hit her.
"Each board has to be made from scratch," she said, explaining that when she sits down to the build the week's games, she'll consult her notebook and spreadsheet, which is like a "digital sketchpad."
"I usually don't know where a board is going to go. It really does a long time to fudge things and try different angles."
Liu described how she knows while some people love Connections, they also can get "mad" at it, but has some helpful hints on how to make sure you have more success than failure.
"My best piece advice is to wait as long as you can before guessing," she began. "You may see the board and have completely identified the category, seeing five words that could belong in that category.
"Don't try to guess the four words in that category, because even though you know what the fifth member is, you won't know which of the four it might not be," which would ultimately waste a turn.
By trying your hand at finding another category first, it is likely to remove the words that could belong to more than one group, ultimately meaning there's less chance to commit an error, because "your four guesses go by extremely quickly."
"Don't do what I do which is 'rage solve'," she added.
Update 06/11/24, 7:08 a.m. ET: The headline on this article was updated.
Update 06/12/24, 10:28 a.m. ET: The article was updated to reference Liu's current role at NYT.
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