Heidi Erwin is a senior game designer at The New York Times, where she’s worked for four years developing new games. She led game design for word and logic puzzles including Connections, Strands and Pips, and contributes riddles to the New York Times Gameplay newsletter. Erwin is also a comic artist whose work covers themes of friendship, mental gymnastics and hope. She was a design lead and programmer for the Brown-RISD Game Developers student organization during her four years at Brown University, from which she graduated in 2021 with concentrations in game design and development and computer science. She’s also been a game design intern at Activision and developed an accessible, educational children’s video game as an intern at PBS. Erwin was named to the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 list.