Transcript of ‘The Pyrotechnics of Puzzles:’ How NYT Games Are Made

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I'm Rachel Abrams, and welcome to our first subscriber-only episode of The Daily. We are going to be making these from time to time, in part because there are just things we don't do on the show that could be interesting and fun, at least fun for us, but hopefully also fun for you, our listeners, who go the extra step of subscribing and supporting our work. For our first episode, we asked all of you for questions about how we make things at the times, and we heard from a lot of people about one topic in particular, games. Crossword, wordle, connections, spelling bee. You all had a lot of questions, so we assembled an all-star team of editors and game makers from the New York Times game Department to tell us how they work. We got them into a room on a call. We asked them your questions. We asked them some of our questions. I definitely asked them at least one question for my dad. And here's that conversation. I I'm Rachel Abrams, and this isn't the Daily. Okay, I am so excited that we are going to get to talk about New York Times Games today.

It's one of my favorite parts of this company. I am here with three New York Times Games editors. Guys, you want to introduce yourselves really quickly. Tell us your name and what game or games you work on. We'll start with you, Wynna. Yeah, hi.

My name is Wina Lou. I am a puzzle editor on the games team, and I write the Daily Connections puzzle and also edit the crossword.

I'm Joel Faliano. I created the mini crossword for the New York Times and work on many other games here.

I'm Sam Mazarsky, Digital Puzzles Editor for the Times. Most of you all know me from editing the Daily Digital Spelling Bee as well as boxed, but I also still lend a helping hand with the crossword, which is how I got my start.

I feel like people have really strong relationships and associations with New York Times Games. I will share my own, which is during the pandemic, my dad and I, my dad lives in California, we played the crossword every single day together over the phones. We each have our phones out and would be solving it together. My dad also can solve a Saturday crossword, I'm not even kidding, without cheating in 12 minutes.

Respect.

Speedy, speedy.

Yeah. My very first question is, do you ever cheat?

I have a story about cheating versus not cheating. Excellent.

Let's start there.

I can't wait to hear this.

When I started solving the New York Times crossword in the paper, you get to fold it up and it's this nice little packet.

By hand? You started solving it by hand? Yeah.

Every time I didn't know an answer, which was most of the time, I left it blank and I never looked up the answer from the next day. It was some weird punishment for myself. I didn't earn the answer, so I didn't get it. As a result, I never learned any of those words. I didn't really get better, and I kept on making the same mistakes over and over again. Now, I recommend that cheating is great or looking up the answers is great. Hot take.

Cheating is great.

Quote, Winna Lou, Cheating is great. Yeah, let's get that out there in the world.

Okay, we'll just end the subscriber content now. I think we got what we need.

When it's so funny, I have a very similar story to that, which is the very first puzzle book I ever got. Really, the first puzzle I ever solved was a vacation I was taking with my mom in seventh grade, and she got me a New York Times crossword book. It was Monday puzzles. I was so excited. I was like, Here we go. I got two answers on the first puzzle. I was like, Okay, maybe this one was a hard one. I flipped it and I got one answer on the next one. I was just I was defeated. I literally put it down and didn't look at New York Times Puzzles for two years and got back into it later. And I wish I had just asked somebody like, Oh, so what is Elvis Presley's middle name? Or whatever the crazy trivia was at the time.

A-r-o-n. Yeah. Aaron, the things you learn from doing the New York Times crossword every day and the things you absorb when you're making them- The useless knowledge you learn is really what you're trying to say.

Yeah. But yeah, I think the lesson from that is that people of puzzle solving is this solitary thing. It's really much better when you welcome more people in when you're able to make it a communal thing and a learning thing.

Sam, what about you?

Yeah, I was just going to say, I guess I'm taking this from the great New York Times Crossword Editor Will Shorts, who himself took this from the great Will Wang. Now, I'm the third generation to say it is your puzzle. You get to solve it however you like. I will personally say, I really just don't believe there's anything such as cheating unless it is cheating to you. I think crosswords are so cool because you get to learn these new things, whether you decide to solve in pencil or pen on paper, whether you use auto check to help you out, whether you just skip and google things to help with a tough crossing that you wouldn't have known otherwise. I think it's just cool to be able to have your own individualized satisfying puzzle solving experience.

All that being said, googling the wordle is cheating. I just wanted to make it clear. You googled the wordle.

That is a death to issue. One of the three of you will sink. Yeah.

It's your puzzle. Solve it however you would like.

Okay, so how does one end up working as an editor for the New York Times game section?

I can start. I joined the earliest of the three of us here. So myself, Wynna and Sam all got our start making crossword puzzles for the New York Times. So one of the really cool things the New York Times puzzle team does is accept crossword submissions from around the country. Anybody can send a puzzle in, and you hear back from the editors with feedback. So all of us got into crosswords and realized somebody must be making these, started sending in our puzzles. So that was me in high school.

You sent in a puzzle because you wanted the New York Times to publish it.

To publish it, yeah. I had that hubris as a high school. Confidence. Well, they'll publish my stuff. Yeah, I mean, my dad was a Daily New York Times crossword solver, and he started photocopying the puzzle for me. And I just thought, okay, somebody's making I'll try. I made them for my dad first. I sent them into the New York Times and got an email back from Will Short saying, yeah, it's not very good, but this part was good. This part was interesting. After a number of attempts, it was finally published. That following summer Wait, how old were you when you got a crossword? I was 17.

Oh, wow.

Then that following summer, when I was a freshman in college, I didn't have a job for the summer. I was pretty panicked. I was thinking like, What could I do? What could I do? I just cold-emailed Will Shorts and was like, Do you have an intern? Is that a thing you'd be willing to entertain? He actually did. Then that person dropped out. He emailed me a couple of weeks later, Do you still not have a job? I still didn't have a job. I guess the rest is history. That was 2011, and then I officially joined in 2014. It's luck. A big part of it is luck. A big part of it is you making your own luck. But I don't think... I don't want to speak for us, but none of us thought we would be puzzle editors growing up. It's not really a real thing that you fire to be, but just by happenstance, made it our careers.

I love that. I love that Will Shwartz actually wrote back to you. I feel like people in this newsroom are often so incredibly busy that just hearing that somebody took the time to respond to a high schooler who wanted to submit a puzzle, that's so deeply charming.

Yeah, and we try to pay it forward to this day. Anyone who sends in a puzzle to us, one of our editors writes them back with feedback on how they can get better.

Sam, how did you end up becoming an editor at the game section?

Joel gets to tell the story of his parents doing this, and he at least got to look over their shoulder, and he just happened to dabble in high school. I was just a giant nerd. I don't really have that cool of a story other than I was into fill it in puzzles, which look just like crosswords, but instead of clues, it gives you a list of answers alphabetized by length. At some point along the line, I think it was my dad Just in trying to get me into crosswords, got me this book of Will Shorts' Favorite Crosswords. I must have been 12, 13 years old. That was a monumental change for me because it wasn't just like, all right, I get it. I don't know all this trivia that I'm supposed to know, and it's that these grids just looked so cool. These themes were so interesting. You could write multiple letters into a single square. You could stack three 15-letter answers at the top. I was so into just the patterns and the pyrotechnics, if you will, of puzzles. So I was just as interested in the puzzle making side of it. Of course, not really knowing that normal humans just made puzzles for the times, but went down this deep dark rabbit hole in middle school and high school, found out that there is, in fact, this burgeoning community of puzzle making people that I've now been welcomed to the ranks of.

And I also have my first time's puzzle published when I was 17, and led to another, and here I am.

I think I'm going to echo what Joel said in the beginning about luck. I feel like I've been extraordinarily lucky. For me, my crossword journey was I had a crush on someone who worked at a chess shop, and I always saw him doing the New York Times Crossword. I was like, I also do the New York Times Crossword. I didn't. I would walk by. I would be walking by in the neighborhood and being like, Oh, did you do today's puzzle? Oh, my gosh. We would work on the puzzle together a little bit. We became friends, and we actually went to a tournament together and co-solved. It was very fun. But then I got really, really into solving puzzles for a number of years. Then I was too shy to go to the crossword tournaments. There's one local tournament in New York every year, Lala Pazzula, which is excellent. I would go every year, but I would be too shy to talk to anyone, so I would go solve the puzzles and run away. Then in 2017, I went on a crossword cruise with my mom because my mom was I love cruises. You love crossroads.

We're doing this cruise. That's where I met Joel. I met Joel on a crossword cruise in 2017.

Yeah, we need to pause on the crossword cruise. It's a phrase that's not that common.

It's 15 letters, though.

I could maybe assume what a crossword cruise is, but I think it's what you're imagining.

Yeah, actually, we weren't allowed to call it a cruise because it didn't make any stops. You were just on a boat for a week and a half. It was a crossword crossing.

Actually, the story, it was the New York Times Journeys. Is that what it was? The old travel wing of the New York Times. It was doing the Titanic route in the winter. It was the North Atlantic in the winter with no stops. Then we did a bunch of puzzles on it.

You just basically sailed across the ocean doing puzzles, not stopping to go on any land.

Then we got off and then flew home.

Wait, I love this. Also, Sam, I clocked. It was not lost on me that you immediately said that Crossword Cruise had 15 letters. Did you just count that in your head as we were talking?

Sam can do this.

We all could do this to a very extent.

I need to use my fingers.

Wait, is this a prerequisite for being a puzzle editor? You have to be able to count letters? Or is this just something that you come with a job?

No, it's the same thing. Sam is not normal.

I will say, I think we all come to the table with different secret sauce skill sets. I guess if Wynnie and Joel are pointing it out as it is like, we're talking again and again about being drawn to patterns with puzzles. In my brain, you can say a phrase, you can say a phrase, that's 16 letters. You just like, it's just always on. Crossword, 14 letters.

Do you ever wish you could turn it off?

Sometimes, yes, but sometimes it also leads to puzzles that I have since made for the times because you go, Oh, wow, I never noticed that that phrase on a sign contains this hidden five-letter word. Imagine that.

We'll be in a meeting and there'll be just a single answer in a puzzle, like I'm trying to, Oreo cookie or something. Sam will go, So Bob Klan débuted that phrase in 2005 in his first crossword. We'll just look at each other like, who? Who knows this? We are in the top 0. 1% of people who know stuff about New York Times crosswords. And Sam is just at the top of the list. He's got a crazy memory.

That's Rich coming from the person who Venmo requested me once for an Uber that we had to share because the Metro North was so messed up in the snow. And the Venmo caption was, It's funny how if you remove the H from Metro North, it anagrams to torment her. So Joel's got some super powers, too. Bust it.

Just another day in the life of a New York Times puzzle editor. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about how the puzzles are actually put together. So let's start with the crossword.

Yeah, I guess I'll take this. So the crossword is the product that we all work on. If you take Connections, that's Winna's, and Spelling Bee, that's Sam's. Everybody, every editor we've hired, all work on the crossword. What does that mean? Basically, we get upwards of 150 crosswords sent a week to us from people around the country, and actually the world now. There are people sending crosswords from countries we've never received crosswords from, which is really exciting. But basically, we get all these puzzles, and that's the start of the funnel. Then our editors review and sort them into different piles, I'll call them. There's puzzles that are just nos, and we send some feedback, say, Thank you for sending this, but such and such part of the... You made up answers here, or it's too many words, or the theme wasn't interesting to us. Then puzzles also make it into what we call the maybes. Then when we finally do take a puzzle, it's edited. The way a crossword is edited is just mainly just changing the clues. We rarely change much about the words in the puzzle, maybe occasionally, but it's mainly just changing the clues.

They're changed for factual accuracy first of all. But then, of course, those who know New York Times crosswords will know the puzzles are ordered by difficulty. So Monday is the easiest crossword, Saturday is the hardest, and Sunday is really big, and it's somewhere in the medium difficulty range. When we're editing a puzzle, a lot of it is actually just changing it for difficulty. It's changing it to make sure the Monday is easy and the Saturday is brutally hard.

Wait. Okay, this is actually something we got a lot of questions about, which is how do you guys decide? What is an easy question? What's a Monday question? What's a Tuesday question? Wednesday. When are you want to- Yeah.

I think that surprisingly, we'll get a submission, and it will often be pretty clear what day of the week that puzzle will run on. Sometimes there's some ambiguity, is it a Tuesday or Wednesday? But a Monday theme will be really straightforward. No weird heady stuff.

Give us an example of a Monday theme.

Yeah, a recent puzzle we ran had Red Bordeaux, Justin Trudeau, Super Nintendo, Cookie Dough.

Everybody can figure out that theme. It's Dough, Dough, Dough, Dough, Dough. It's a theme where you don't really need somebody standing beside you being like, Now what they have in common is you don't need that extra level of headiness with the It's a Monday theme. It should come across the page. How do you guys make a determination about the obscurity of something? To me, that's what makes a clue hard. It's like some play or book or actor or piece of history that you would have no idea about. How do you guys determine that?

I think it's pretty subjective. I don't think there's an objective standard, but I feel like you can get a sense of, was this here intentionally? Was this a featured answer that was featured by the constructor because it's meaningful Or is it something that made other words work and fit together? You can usually get a sense of which is which. I think we take that into consideration. I'd be interested in what you guys think.

I think it's changed over time. I think when it was just Will, it was like, well, maybe Will Shorts doesn't know that, and that's considered obscure. When it was Will and I, we probably had our own blind spots. We do have a team now, and I think that's part of the helpful thing of having a team of seven editors who are looking at it that if all of us have not heard of something, it's not a great sign. But then a lot of times someone will vouch for something. No, that really is a big artist. Maybe a couple of you haven't heard of it, and that's the debates we have.

One of the things I really like about this team is I think we're really trying to... We think ourselves as solvers, but we're thinking about all the other people that are solving our puzzles. We don't want that to be our vibe to be like, You have to know this capital crossed with this other thing you might not know. If you didn't, of course, then the crossroads is just not right for you. You'll figure it out next time. You want it to be accessible and really pull people from all walks of life.

It's interesting to think about the fact that your jobs are basically to figure out something that feels challenging enough for whatever day it is, but also solve solvable, hard enough to be difficult but easy enough to be achievable. I wonder if that's how you see it.

Yeah, I think finding the balance is really important. We do that sometimes. I think it was alluded to with the crossing. If there is maybe a trivia answer that we think maybe people might not be familiar with, we'll try to make sure that all the answers crossing that answer are gettable. You don't want the solver to be stuck on a letter that they don't know.

You're If you have a really hard vertical word, you want the horizontal clues to be easier.

Yes, exactly. Got it. For Connections, if there's going to be a really tough wordplay category, I'll try to not put maybe a trivia category in that same puzzle because you don't want the solver to get stuck. It's okay to have some hard stuff, but it's good to balance it out. It should be fair. It should ideally be solvable. The solver should have some in.

Okay, so the crosswords are submitted by people. But what about spelling bee, for example? How do you create the spelling bee for the day?

For those tuning in for the first time, the way spelling bee works is there's seven different letters arranged in a hexagonal shape. One of the letters is in the center. You make words by anagramming. The only twist or there are two twists is you must use the center letter, and you can use all of the letters as often as possible. With just the letters A, C, and I, you can make Asai, and you can also make acacia. So I'm not kicking back in a chair and going, You know what words you can make with seven different letters? Let's try this and let's just brainstorm all the other words you can make with seven letters. I have a database at my disposal. I think I can say that. Theoretically, there are so many different combinations of things that can be made with seven different letters and subsets of them. My role as editor, which is why I draw the line saying I edit spelling be versus where I create it from scratch, is my role is to pick out the good puzzles. You want to be excited by this puzzle. And then I will also, I already have the pre-populated, if you will, word list.

That is the theoretical every last answer that could possibly be made of those seven letters. It's my job to go through the controversial job, of course, of deciding which words should be accepted in that puzzle for the day. It is data-driven, but it is human-curated. Is probably the best way I could put spelling bee.

Okay. How do you decide what words are acceptable?

Yes. You've got three hours for this, right?

Yeah, three hours. No, we're sending the studio time.

I can see Joel and Wynna already nodding off. They're like, Here he goes again.

No, I'm curious because I got some knits to pick with you, too. So go ahead. Of course. Fight, fight.

That's what this is all about.

As everybody does.

Sharpening my knife.

Even just as a little teaser, I would say I, as a solver, would even pick knits with myself as an editor sometimes. The vast majority, in spite of how much this is talked about, the vast majority is very easy. Ball. Yes. Call. Fall.

These are all- Noncontroversial words.

I'm with you so far.

I'm here. You're following me thus far. Then there are words I'm not at the risk of one, just totally airing or two, at the risk of being squarely in somebody's wheelhouse. There are words that we'll call them Scrabble Words. They are things that are not even listed in some dictionaries. They're only found in unabridged things. It is this genus of shrub that only lives in this one country in the world. So there needs to be a line drawn somewhere because you want to be able to find as many words as possible. You don't want the reason you didn't get to genius because there are all these Scrabblewords. So that's the philosophy around pruning the wordless, as I like to say to begin Then you get to... Joel, I'll call you right out. Then you get to the name of a bird.

Which one?

Joel's a big bird guy.

Which one that you left off?

Joel and Joel's father. Shout out Joel's dad, our big bird guys. There are some birds that are in the spelling bee, and there are some birds that are in the spelling bee, and there are some birds that aren't. And it seems really, really arbitrary. I'm not laughing at you going, Ha-ha, you love niche birds. No, birds should be in the spelling bee. And to be clear, my stance on this has changed over time, allowing more and more birds in the spelling bee because everybody has their own bits of, we'll call it a specialized thing. But hey, to you bird lovers out there, it's probably not seemingly specialized to you, right?

Which birds make the cut?

Let's see. Joel, you want to say one that doesn't?

One that doesn't is anhinga, which drives me crazy because you go to Florida, you see anhingas everywhere. Then pica is not in there, which I don't think pica is in there, right? Which is just like a rodent.

Sam, your rebuttal?

No. My rebuttal actually is literally is a non-rebuttal. I guess what I myself have learned my own journey as editor is it's fascinating just how arbitrary language is, words that are accepted in some dictionaries but not accepted in other dictionaries. So spelling bee is just yet another lexicon that just has some things and doesn't have others. Then there's that extra layer of making it fun and accessible to such a widespread group of solvers out there. It's a journey, and it's ever evolving.

What is your hill to die on, Bird or other thing that you were like, this must be a clue?

In Spelling Bee? In any of the games. Okay.

I think Connections is a good one. I mean, what things have you been like, I know people are telling me not to do this in Connections, but you know what? I'm in charge of Connections.

Okay, we can talk about, we can pivot to Loris for a second. Loris was in Werdle. Loris is good. Loris was the Werdle word. We had a great discussion. I was extremely pro-Loris. Who else was- I was anti-Loris, just for the record.

Wait, Loris- I was also- L-O-R-I-S.

Wait, Loris.

I was like, Is Loris a person? Is Loris a word? Sorry, Loris is a word.

I'm making my point that maybe it shouldn't be the world. That is why I was.

That maybe it shouldn't be the wortel. The slow Loris, they're adorable. They're slow.

When I put it in a mini, then put it in another mini, then was like, she's just like, The biggest Loris fan you'll meet.

I like them a lot.

It's a primate with a nocturnal primate, I think Madagascar, with really big eyes. It looks like a, what are they, furby? Yeah, it looks like a furby.

To be clear, To the Loris vive out there, we know Loris is… It's not Loris. It's got to be Loris.

Sam, is there a Loris Hive, though? That's what I really want to know. Yes.

When is their champion? Team Loris. It is their queen.

When is their queen?

When is the Loris, queen?

My hope is that someone, you will then Google Loris, and you will be greeted with all these amazing, adorable pictures of the Loris, and you'll be happy.

Okay, but I feel like many people would tweet, What the heck is this word in the world?

I think that actually happened. I think that happened. I think you're right, actually. I wish I had spoken to you before I made this call.

I feel like one thing you learn working at the New York Times as a journalist is that people in your when they have taken issue with a story that you probably had nothing to do with, they will let you know first. I wonder, do you guys have people in your lives who will complain to you about a clue or a puzzle they didn't like? How do you respond?

I've got you. My dad, at this point, there's no context. There's no even gentle thing, to be clear. I love my dad. We have a great relationship. But dad, he just sends me Google links to words every day. Wait, does he want them in the spelling bee or the cross? He wants them in the spelling bee. Yeah. At this point, there's no context. I'm like, Come on, man. Not this again. At this point, I just laugh and we have good conversations around it. But that's my little anecdote of someone close to my life that solves puzzles.

I mean, one of the cool parts about New York Times games being popular is that everyone in my family plays it. So, when we go on family vacations, the morning ritual around the coffee is do the spelling bee, complain about the words that aren't there, do the connections. My mom complains about the Purple category to me and tells me to text win it, and I don't. And there's just like, it's fun. I think it's part of the... I think it's part of the enjoyment sometimes is- The complaints? The complaints. It's enjoyment for other people, I'll say. For us, I think as editors, you develop a thick skin for one thing, but you also... I mean, you want the feedback to help you become better at your job, but you get feedback from people in real life, too.

Wynna, do you have anybody in your life?

My parents, unlike theirs, do not play any of the games. They show me their support in other ways. My dad wears his Connections baseball cap, which is really great. My mom made me this mug that says Wina and connection on it. It's very cool. But my dad is like, your cousins say this game is too hard, and they don't play it. But I do hear complaints, and it's okay. It's good. I get it. I love being mad at stuff. I think it's just cool.

Who among us has not complained about something?

Let me flip this around. My dad likes to send me screenshots when he gets like, Queen B on the spelling bee or genius. Sorry, when he gets genius level or when he completes a crossword quickly. Do you get unsolicited screenshots from people who want to brag about their scores? I love it.

I solicit it. You solicit it? I'm like, I think people... I don't know if this is true for you all, but I think people assume that everyone sends me their scores, and so people are like, I don't want to send you. I assume that. Really, not many people do. I've been like, No, you can send me your scores. I like it.

I like seeing it. What I'm hearing is, I should send you my scores. That's what I'm taking from this.

Joel, that's what I'm telling you right now.

I'm about to lay down sometimes.

We wear what you wish.

I have one last question for all of you guys. By the way, you're about to get so many solicited scores right now after this air. Yeah.

Thank you in advance.

I'm going to ask all three of you, generally speaking, what makes a good game?

I like a feeling. I try and put myself in the shoes of the solver. That's, I'd say, really just a lot of what we do in editing our games. My golden rule is you keep the solver in mind throughout your entire process. So one of the things for me, especially puzzles, maybe even juxtaposed with games, is you really just want to feel a sense of accomplishment somehow. Even if that is just your daily jolt from your wordle every day and keeping up your streak or your mini crossword or cracking the code on a tough crossword theme early, I think what makes a good puzzle is being able to feel a sense of achievement. You get for nothing else, you get that dose of dopamine that says, I did it.

Joel?

I think unpredictable is a word that comes to mind. There's nothing worse than a stale puzzle. To me, I'm not a Sudoku person because of that. I know what I'm going to get with a Sudoku. But I love when I open up connections each day, it's like, what did Wynna come up with? You got to do some Samurai Sudoku. You're not going to convince me to get into Sudoku. That's just not going to happen. I would say playful. One thing that's a hallmark of our games is that they're human-created. You can feel the spark of another human mind on the other end. Anything auto-generated, you just feel it. I feel like that's something we try to have. It's just a playful spirit to the puzzles that you can feel while you're solving them. Then the last thing is just solvable. There's nothing worse than opening a puzzle and just not being able to do it either because the puzzle was made too hard or whatever it is. At the end of the day, we want people to solve our puzzles despite what it might come across. We really do. Solvable is the last one for me.

Wina?

I'd like to echo a lot of those points. I think that sense of humor. It's nice when things are funny. I think that just the fact that we're all people and the solvers are people, and we're communicating in some way to each other. It's playful. It's a game. It should be fun and solvable. I do think that that is… It's true. Believe it or not, we…

Not impossible. Solvable.

Right. We do want them to be solvable.

Well, Wynna, Joel, Sam, thank you guys so much for joining me to talk about New York Times Games.

Thank you.

It's been an absolute pleasure. It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and edited by Brenda Clinkenberg. Contains music by Dan Powell, Diane Wong, and Marion Lozano. This episode was engineered by Katie McCurran. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you next time.