My task was to construct 60 boards with four categories each for the beta. Green and blue were sorted based on their inclusion of potentially unfamiliar terms or trivia. Purple was meant to be the trickiest category, a stand-alone puzzle incorporating a wordplay element. I wanted yellow to be the most straightforward category, as a foothold for solvers. I organized my spreadsheet into four colors: yellow, green, blue and purple, in spectral order. 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. 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. There would have to be a mix of categories for the game to feel challenging and satisfying. (“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. With this in mind, I began keeping a notebook to jot down category ideas.
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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. The work of Robert Leighton, a cartoonist and puzzle maker, stood out to me. I thought back on the Games magazine anthologies that my mom got for me when I was a child.
How could I apply my clue-writing experience to this pithier format? 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 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. Most of my puzzle experience has been working with crosswords, and I was excited at the chance to try something different. Connections beta opened on June 12.Ī 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. Players must select four groups of four words without making more than four mistakes. Connections is a daily game about finding common threads between words.
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