NYT Connections: The woman who makes it every day isn't sure why it makes you so bad.

To celebrate the recent first anniversary of its hit game Connections, the New York Times games department gave players a rare peek behind the puzzle’s emblematic yellow, green, blue, and purple stripes: It was a video, posted on TikTok, of the woman who comes up with Connections every day, Wyna Liu, looking back on some of her favorite boards. “Wyna is somebody who can think abstractly and honestly make connections between things and express her thoughts or her humor in a way that’s abstract,” Mason said. As for the game’s signature, baffling-to-some yellow-to-purple difficulty scale, Liu said, “I remember just hearing some thoughts from the design team, about like, ‘Should it be hot to cold? “One of the things that’s been fun about Connections is that people are very funny on social media,” Mason said. “Figuring out how to make a thing has always been really deeply satisfying, even if it’s not particularly useful.” If a miniature French Revolution execution device does somewhat contradict Mason’s claim that the games department isn’t powered by masochism, it makes a certain kind of sense: Of course Connections is overseen by someone who made a tiny guillotine in her spare time.