Strands

The NYT expands its gaming empire with another decent word puzzle

Web
$40/year
NYT Games
5 minutes

Strands is a daily wordsearch-like puzzle game. Words are hidden within a 6x8 letter grid; letters can be connected horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. All the words are based on a theme, with one word (the “spangram”) summarising the theme, its letters touching two opposite sides of the grid.

NYT’s official instruction GIF; here, “Fruit” is the spangram

You drag or tap letters to construct a word; correct “theme words” get highlighted in blue and spangrams in yellow. Like a wordsearch or a crossword, there’s a single solution to this puzzle. If you construct a word that isn’t part of the solution, it fills up your hint bar. Do this three times and you earn a hint indicating the region of undiscovered theme words.

The small grid size leads to a hill-shaped difficulty curve. At the start of a game, it’s usually easy to discern one or two words related to the theme, then it’s harder to find more obscure words whose letters aren’t as clustered. Once you’ve found more half of the words, however, it’s straightforward to find the rest by process of elimination by looking at “alleys” of letters and working backwards. Here’s a completed Strands puzzle with the theme “Don’t do it"!” and the spangram “Cardinal Sins”:

Cardinal Sins – cute!

There’s no score and no timer, just a count of how many hints you’ve used, though this might change if and when Strands leave beta.

Figuring out the day’s theme can be the hardest problem. “Don’t do it!” was pretty clearly related to prohibited or bad things, and “Sounds good to me” was about musical instruments, but another day’s theme, “Do the do”, tricky enough I had to resort to a hint:

BRAID!

I was fixated on “do” meaning “party”, especially with the Oscars coming up, so I tried “STARS” and suchlike, to no success. It turns out this is more of a Britishism than the North American slang for “do”:

The two cultures

Once it gave me BRAID it became easier to search for and spot similar hair-related words:

Even so, other words like MOHAWK, BEEHIVE, DREADS, and TOPKNOT didn’t come as quickly to mind, making this the toughest puzzle I’d played to date. The whole thing is yet another reminder that word puzzles are much more culturally specific than people imagine. It’s not just about knowing the names of US vs. UK sports teams, it’s about how quickly your mind can connect different concepts.

Strands, like crosswords and suduko, is more of a puzzle format than a specific game. Each day’s puzzle is unique – some are good, some less good, depending on the creator and the theme. In fact, the entire point of Strands is that decrypting the theme unlocks everything. Along with the small grid, it’s what makes the puzzle manageable given that words aren’t in straight lines, as in traditional wordsearches. Any frustration, like I had with “Do the do”, can only last for a few minutes until you either figure it out or use a hint, and those moments are made up for delightfully-crafted puzzles like the cardinal sins one.

Taking another step back, it’s best to understand Strands as a prospective member of The New York Times’ complement of nine daily games, which now includes multiple crosswords, shape and pattern-based puzzles (Tiles and Vertex), number puzzles (Sudoku), and word puzzles (Spelling Bee, Connections, Letter Boxed, and Wordle). Some of these are more time consuming and difficult than others, like the main crossword, whereas others like Wordle might take less than a minute. Strands isn’t that quick, but it’s very simple and it extends the NYT’s jealously-defended territory to yet another puzzle niche.

That territory is already massive. The Mini crossword was played over a billion times last year; Connections is played by over ten million users a week; the NYT Games app was downloaded over ten million times in 2023. Many of those users won’t be paying subscribers, but there are probably millions of NYT subscribers who play at least one of their games a day and to whom the games are a significant reason for their continued subscription.

Games are habit forming, and that includes puzzles. I started playing Puzzmo – a collection of puzzles and minigames like NYT Games – in November, partly to cover it for this newsletter. Four months later and I’ve racked up over 100 hours across a thousand puzzles, with streaks extending to 143 days. And I wasn’t even a puzzle guy before!

One could come up with all sorts of evolutionary psychology just-so stories for how these puzzle scratch an itch for NYT subscribers who remain otherwise unfulfilled in their sedentary, desk-bound, suburban lives (“hunter gatherers liked pattern detection and categorising plants”, “on the African savannah our ancestors liked strategising how animals would move, like in chess, etc.”). Regardless: they’re popular.

They’re a pleasant distraction, formulaic enough to require precisely 40-60% of your intellectual capacity, with gentle difficulty spikes to keep things interesting, yet not so distracting they’ll end up consuming hours of your life. In other words, they’re perfect for NYT readers.