Wyna Liu Brought a Game-Jam Idea to Life as the Times' Second-Most-Played Game
The crossword constructor behind NYT Connections builds every board herself, and her path to the job started with a stack of puzzles she could not solve.
The person who makes the puzzle that millions of people are quietly failing at before breakfast is not, as far as I can tell, trying to ruin your morning. Wyna Liu, the editor of The New York Times' Connections, has described her work with real affection, and she built the game from an idea that started life at a company game jam.
Here is the part of her story I keep returning to. As a child, Liu's mother bought her collection books of Games magazine puzzles, and Liu has said she could not solve any of them - she simply liked looking at them. A kid who loved the look of unsolved puzzles grew up to invent one, which is either a heartwarming arc or a deeply suspicious one, and I choose heartwarming.
The formal biography is shorter than the legend. Liu earned a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and a master's from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, a famously playful graduate program that treats making as thinking. She began constructing crosswords after meeting New York Times editor Joel Fagliano on a crossword-themed cruise in 2017, and her first Times crossword ran in February 2019.
The Times hired her as an associate puzzle editor in 2020. When Connections launched in beta on June 12, 2023, Liu was the editor chosen to bring it to life, and today she constructs the boards herself and releases a new one each day. That is a remarkable amount of daily craft for one person.
Before Connections, Liu was already a working crossword constructor, with puzzles in The New Yorker and the AV Club as well as the Times. The daily shape of the job is quieter than the game's noise: she builds each board herself and releases it on the same schedule for everyone who is waiting.
The same hands make jewelry
The detail that lands hardest is that Liu's other serious practice is making jewelry and small wearable sculptures. Her pieces are inspired by crystalline structures and often use magnets pushed to the edge of their tension, so a shape holds itself in place through invisible force. A puzzle and a magnet share the same quiet trick: the interesting part is what you cannot see holding it together.
On the Design Tangents podcast, she talked about the overlap between the two crafts and how her love of puzzles connects to her wearable work. The hosts describe her games as "challenging, sharable and meme-worthy," which is about right for a puzzle whose answer grid people post to social media like a trophy.
The podcast is hosted by two of her fellow ITP alums, Josh Rubin and Evan Orensten, which is probably why the conversation stays comfortable; they talk to her the way people talk to someone who builds things with their hands.
I keep thinking about those magnets. A Connections board works the same way: sixteen words held in place by a category you cannot see, and the whole arrangement collapses the moment you stop believing in the invisible part. A person who makes jewelry understands that part of the game better than most.
A life mostly off the grid, in Chinatown
One thing that is easy to respect: Liu lives in Manhattan's Chinatown and, by her own account, largely stays away from social media. The person who makes a game that is fundamentally about being seen as clever has opted out of the platform where everyone performs being clever. That feels like the whole game in miniature.
So when you open Connections tomorrow and the purple group is once again four words that rhyme with desserts, remember the person at the other end. She is in Chinatown, probably not reading the replies, and she has been arranging puzzles she could not solve into puzzles she can since she was a child. You are playing against someone who loves the game more than she loves winning it.
Sources
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