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.

“So my mortal enemy has a name,” one user commented.

“I just want to talk, Wyna,” another wrote, in a mock-menacing tone—or so one hopes.

For many viewers, it was their first time laying eyes on someone who had become, without their even knowing it, a daily presence in their lives. Connections has amassed millions of fans since debuting last year, joining the New York Times’ industry-leading slate of games. Even among heavy hitters like the storied crossword puzzle and 2022’s viral sensation Wordle, Connections—which challenges players to find the hidden elements linking the words in its daily grid of 16 boxes—has stood out, with the Times calling the game its most successful launch in years. That has been in no small part because of Liu.

Once you realize that Connections is constructed by a single person, not a team, and certainly not a computer, you might start to see hints of Liu’s personality in the puzzles she creates—a sly wit, an affinity for certain areas of pop culture, like rock music, plus an obvious appreciation for wordplay. But it’s an awfully big job for one person: Get invested enough in Connections, and its easy to feel like Liu holds a weird sway over your life, as a chosen one who’s been endowed with the power to make or destroy thousands of people’s days in one fell swoop. (Liu does work with a whole apparatus of people on the games team, but it’s her name that appears on every board.)

I wanted to see what it’s like to be so good at making puzzles that people online refer to you as their sworn enemy and you meanwhile endure the daily pressure of being able to throw off a whole country’s morning mojo. At lunch at the New York Times cafeteria one day recently, I got my chance.

“I’m not really on social media,” Liu told me as she sipped a green smoothie at a table near a window that looked out onto Midtown, a blow to those desperate for her to acknowledge her dark powers. “I do hear from my friends and colleagues and stuff, and people like to put things in Slack, and sometimes people text me. It’s very cool that people like playing and talking about the game. But I’m pretty shy about it.”

She is aware that some of that discussion invokes her name directly, which she is diplomatic about: “I’m a person, and the game is from me in some ways, so I do sort of understand the addressing me thing, I think,” she said.

“She’s so sweet,” interrupted her boss, Everdeen Mason, the Times games editorial director, who was also at lunch. “Sometimes I think it’s just real out of hand.” I suspected Mason had joined us partly because Liu—cerebral and soft spoken—wasn’t entirely comfortable with being the center of attention.

“The puzzle part is easier than the talking about it part for me,” Liu said.

Mason told me she sees herself as a Kris Jenner–style momager to her team, providing the resources for their talents to shine. To extend her metaphor, I wonder if that might make Liu the Kylie Jenner of the Times games ecosystem—not quite the powerhouse that is Kim Kardashian/the crossword, but certainly a huge star, with a real chance at being the future of the empire.

That’s probably the only time you’ll hear quiet, thoughtful Liu compared to a Kardashian, though arguably one other way that she’s like the infamous sisters is that her style undeniably stands out—on the day we met, she was wearing a hair clip featuring a very realistic facsimile of a single french fry that she’d bought on Etsy, as well as a ring of her own design. Her creative streak, and her ability to think just a little differently from everyone else, is part of what made Mason think she’d be the ideal editor for Connections when the opportunity arose.

“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. “That was kind of perfect for the game.”

You get a sense of this hearing Liu talk about building boards for Connections. “The process is I have a notebook where I keep down category ideas. And when I sit down to make boards, I’ll take one of those ideas, I’ll take those words, and then I’ll start spinning off of them. And then the boards will be built from that, and sometimes it goes in surprising directions,” she said. “I feel like that’s sort of one of the most joyful things about making games. I don’t know what the categories are gonna be. I start with like a seed. And then I’m just like, ‘Oh, what does this word do?,’ and then maybe like a dozen categories of possibilities and then you kind of see if any of those words are playing off each other, and the brain builds from that.”

“The constraints help move it forward in a way,” she went on. “If I reuse a word or something, I try to contextualize it differently. So it really does push editorially what the parameters are.”

Liu had initially joined the games team as a more general editor. As Vanity Fair recounted last year, she connected with one of the company’s puzzle editors on a cruise for crossword enthusiasts. This was after a somewhat peripatetic few years: “I was making jewelry,” she said. “I was teaching yoga. I was doing some after-school programs. I was doing a lot of part-time things. And I was making puzzles.” She also went to grad school, for interactive art.

The idea for Connections was pitched in-house, and though it took some time, it was one the team always had a feeling about. “Not to be woo-woo, but this was a game where we just kind of fucking knew it was going to be great,” Mason said. “I was really bullish about it for a really long time.” They went through a few different names before they landed on the easy-to-mistake-for-a-dating-app Connections: Group Think and Grouper were a couple options that didn’t make the cut. Matchbox was deemed too close to Letter Boxed, another Times game.

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? Should it be like traffic signs—green is go and red is stop—or like a map, so red is hot and blue is cold?’ Stuff like that. And I feel like what they landed on is just perfect because, just from the construction perspective, difficulty is very subjective, and not super straightforward.”

The game took off almost as soon as it launched in beta mode in June 2023, which initially left the team scrambling. “We thought we’d have the opportunity to take the game down and then build it,” Mason said, “but then it was so big that they were like, ‘We can’t lose this momentum.’ ”

After a frantic period, they were able to catch up. Now, Liu has building boards down to a science—she said it takes about two hours to create one from scratch.

The Times has had other hit games before, but one thing that distinguishes Connections is how infused with Liu’s identity it’s always been. “There’s a brain and a personality attached,” Mason said. “I would say Spelling Bee is really similar. Wordle I think is like that, I think you can feel Tracy”—Tracy Bennett, Wordle’s editor—”and her decisions in that game. I think that’s also something that we’re starting to develop ourselves as a team, as the team grows, it’s like, OK, when do people want a consistent voice, versus when is it OK or more fun to feel different things? The crossword has a lot of different constructors, but there is a very heavy-hand, overarching editor. Every game kind of has a different combination of that.”

“Honestly, Connections is our heaviest editorial. I would consider Connections, and Strands, more editorial than like Spelling Bee, obviously Tiles, Sudoku,” Mason said.

So when users address Liu personally, calling her their enemy and an evil genius, they’re in part responding to the very real way that she pours herself into her puzzles, in a manner you don’t quite get with the other games. That may account for another thing that’s set Connections apart from the other games offerings: its reach online.

“One of the things that’s been fun about Connections is that people are very funny on social media,” Mason said. “Sometimes they’re mean, but most of the time it’s cheeky and I think it’s really fun.”

Why has Connections in particular seemed to inspire so much online discourse? The people who work on it aren’t entirely sure, but Mason had some guesses: “There’s something about it that makes people want to make, like, relatability content about it in a way that they don’t about, like, the crossword or even Spelling Bee. It takes more effort than Wordle. There’s more of a story there. But then it’s not like an hour of your time, like the crossword? I have no idea. I think that the audience of our newer games honestly is just more online. I just think that Connections is more memeable. You can make more jokes with that screenshot.”

Maybe it’s that simple. Though the designers of, say, Monopoly probably never had to ponder how the game would travel on TikTok, today it’s inescapable.

“I do want to say, our goal is not to make people mad,” Mason went on, addressing the “I just want to talk” variety of comments, often directed at Liu. “People always ask me if we purposely made it harder or if we purposely made them easier. Literally, it’s creative people who really love puzzles trying to make the most fun thing they can think of. There’s no like, ‘Muahaha, I just ruined someone’s day.’ ”

Leaning back into Kris Jenner mode, she added, “I think it’s a cognitive thing that happens sometimes that if people feel like they’re punching up or something, if they think that you are unequal to them, whether it’s up or down, they don’t treat you like a human being anymore. Can you imagine if somebody just said these things about you or made these assumptions about you and blasted them all over the internet? The editors aren’t public people. They’re puzzle-makers who work here.”

It came across very clearly that Liu just likes making things, in general, whether it’s puzzles or anything else. As if to prove it, she showed me her most recent jewelry project: a miniature guillotine, with a moveable blade. “A friend of mine showed me a picture of one from the French Revolution, like from a museum. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. I’ll try to make one.’ And then another friend was like, ‘Well, it’s gotta work.’ ” Difficulty level: purple.

“You have an idea from somewhere, and just doing it is just very satisfying for me,” Liu 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. Or at least that’s what I’m going to try to remember to tell myself the next time I lose.