A New Game from The Times

I still hear from readers who learned about the Connections game from this newsletter and now play it every day. Today, I want to tell you about The Times’s newest game, called Strands. It’s another quick, entertaining way to exercise your brain.

Strands is a word search with a few twists. Each day, the puzzle has a theme, and your job is both to find the one word that describes the theme as well as a handful of examples. In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through a puzzle from this past week — and then link to today’s, so you can try for yourself.

A lucky ‘vogue’

The first twist is that Strands allows the letters in a word to travel in multiple directions. The second letter can be above the first letter, while the third letter might be at a diagonal from the second. As an example, look at the upper-left corner of the grid from Thursday, and you can see that T-H-I-S is a potential word. You begin in the very corner, go across to the H, down to the I and over to the S:

The second twist is that each puzzle starts with a brief, and slightly mysterious, description of the theme. The description for the puzzle here was “What’s the issue?”

You may be a better puzzler than I am, but I am rarely able to recognize the theme based only on the mysterious description. That’s OK, because the third twist in Strands is that there is a way to receive hints. If you highlight any three words, even words that have nothing to do with this puzzle, Strands will then give you a hint.

On Thursday, for example, I wasn’t sure what “What’s the issue?” meant, but I did notice the obvious word on the top line: “thigh.” Once I highlighted it, Strands told me I was a third of the way toward a hint. At this point, I got lucky. The second word I noticed was “vogue” — and it turned out to be one of the words that was part of the solution. Strands highlighted it in blue as a result.