Connections is a daily game in which you try to find words that have something in common. Players have to choose four groups of four words without making more than four mistakes. On June 12, Connections testing started.
A few months ago, I got a new task: I had to make the game boards for Connections, a new category-matching game that needed an editor and had just been given the green light. Most of the puzzles I’ve done in the past have been crosswords, so I was excited to try something new. How, if at all, could writing puzzle clues change the way I do things? As a puzzle editor, I spend a lot of my time putting ideas and meanings into the strange and specific structure of our house style. This new game, with its stand-alone words, didn’t give me the room I was used to using to convey meaning. On the other hand, puzzle hints with a stretchy question mark are often based on how words can be interpreted in different ways. Knowing these rules would be very helpful. How could I use my experience writing clues for this format?
When I was a kid, my mom bought me collections of stories from Games magazine. The work of artist and puzzle maker Robert Leighton stood out to me. With the help of an answer key, I figured out that a picture of a tick, a thumbtack, and a tow truck could be used to say “tic-tac-toe.” I also found that a picture of a phone could go with a diamond ring, which is a play on the sound a phone makes, and that a picture of a balloon popping could go with a soda can, since both go “POP!” When I thought about these puzzles, I was aware of how quickly meaning can be shared, and their fun and use of free association gave me ideas.
Keeping this in mind, I started keeping a notebook where I could write down thoughts for categories. “I don’t want to know what the inside of that notebook looks like,” said Joel Fagliano, who is a senior puzzle editor, makes tiny crosswords, and is my boss. I wrote those thoughts on a worksheet, which made them easier to read. For the game to be difficult and fun, there would need to be a variety of genres. This could be where the puzzle part comes in: Some groups might be described by how they use humor, like palindromes, homophones, or adding or taking away letters and words, instead of how the words on the cards actually mean. I saw three things that could make it harder that could be changed: how common the words were, how hard it was to put them into groups, and how different the humor was.
I put my chart in spectrum order by color, from yellow to green to blue to purple. I wanted yellow to be the easiest group so that solutions could get started. The purple group was meant to be the hardest. It was a separate problem with a humor factor. Green and blue were put together based on how many new words or facts they had. For the test, it was my job to make 60 boards with four groups each. I thought that with this way of putting things together, I could take one area from each color group to make a well-balanced game board. I soon found out I was wrong!
I saw that I didn’t use many words from the blue column because it was hard to hide specific words. For example, players might not know how to use the diacritics on the words DIERESIS, HACEK, MACRON, and TILDE, but they might know that these words belong to the same group even if they don’t know why. MACRON might fit in another group with “world leaders,” but the other terms are less vague. What I thought would be a hard area turned out to be easy than I thought. Using trivia-based features was a less effective way to make a board hard than having items meet. I noticed other visual clues, such as entries that were either too short or too long. When adding things that might stand out in the grid, care had to be taken because they would immediately draw attention.
My puzzle brain likes things to be clear and limited, so simple jobs like picking four animals or flowers usually send me down a rabbit hole on the internet. I tell myself that this makes the game more exciting, but I may be thinking too much about it. Some categories didn’t make the list because I couldn’t think of four good entries, like slang words for “car” and words that could come before “sound” (“ultrasound” was one word; I didn’t want to have two proper nouns like “Puget” and “Norton,” but if they were all proper nouns? Hmm … )
Other groups didn’t work because they had too many correct names that people didn’t know. Trading card games (KEYFORGE, MAGIC, POKÉMON, and YU-GI-OH) were the theme of a group on an early board. I thought that not everyone would know each game, but I thought they might be able to figure out that they go together, like with the diacritics. Even though that was still true, testers said they were confused by the proper names and chose more general groups.
I’ve liked learning how puzzle editing works once a game is approved and seeing how our team fits into a bigger environment. When I joined this project, it had already been pitched, accepted (we wrote about this process for our last beta, Digits), and tested and researched for usefulness. Many of my first questions were answered by more testing and classes, which also helped me figure out how to edit:
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How many cards should make up each category and board? Should we include a decoy that doesn’t belong to any category?
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Why does the player have to submit the last category?
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What about the colors and difficulty ratings?
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How do we visually present the information that tells players what to do?
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How is feedback given during gameplay?
When I’ve worked on crossword problems, where the rules are well known, I’ve always taken these kinds of things for granted. Working with other members of the Games team was one of the best parts of this process. I worked closely with Heidi Erwin, who is a great digital puzzle creator. She was very patient with me as she taught me about all the different parts that go into making a game. There are a lot of similarities between what we call a puzzle and what we call a game, but learning how they are different has helped me a lot with my work on Connections.
Puzzle lovers can try Connections Game here.