Many people enjoy the New York Times  mini games such as Wordle, Connections, Crossword, and many more! A new game has been added that has been taking daily players by storm. This new game is called Strands, and it’s still in its beta testing stage although playable. 

The daily strands are very similar to a word search puzzle where there are many words to find. For this word search though, it fills up the entire puzzle so all the letters will be taken up by the end. As opposed to a normal word search, Strands doesn’t give you individual words you have to find. Instead it gives you a theme hint, and you have to find the words according to theme as well as the “Spandgram,” which is the theme all the other words are following. This might sound pretty hard, but you can get hints by finding other, non-theme words in the puzzle. If you get three non-theme words, you get a hint for one of the words. This is very helpful, especially if you’re stuck. 

For example on April 8th, 2024 the theme hint was, “It goes by fast”. The words in the puzzle were second, week, month, century, minute, decade, and hour, and the “Spangram ” was Timepieces. As you can see in this example there are eight  words, which is normal, although there can also be six or seven , and possibly less/more. Strands puts out these puzzles everyday, for their daily players to play. As of Friday, April 12, 2024, there will be forty created!

Personally I love playing the Strands every day and love seeing the new puzzles they put out. I think this has been a good addition to my daily games I like to play such as Wordle, Connections, and the mini crossword. The New York Times has made a great game once again!