Exploring the Daily Challenges of NYT's 'Strands'

New York Times’ (NYT) ‘Strands’ is a fundamentally novel approach to word searching tool that constitutes a rich hybrid of linguistic riddles and thematic explorations. Sitting within NYT Games with other popular games, including Wordle and Connections, ‘Strands’ offers a daily intellectual workout. Each day, the players are presented with a 6×8 grid of letters in which several words are hidden to form an interrelated group, given as a theme at the beginning of a day. This group of words turns blue once they have been found and remains visible to the player, as they work their way through the letter grid. The spangram of the day, the thematic word that connects at least the opposite sides of the board, highlighted in yellow, contributes a further challenge of ‘Strands’; it is a word that may include proper names. As is evidently clear, the beauty of the ‘Strands’ game is that it learns to adapt the player’s level on a daily basis.

Specifically, the game is challenging as not only the players need to find certain words, these words as well their groups change day by day. Given the theme, of the ‘Into the Woods’ puzzle, that was revealed at the beginning of the day – a word forest. The spangram of the day forest has further provided a list of two words associated with trees. It is evident that the puzzle ranges in the way it challenges the players from rather indistinct themes to either using synonyms or homophones, as in this particular case, or just hidden missing words in the usual phrases. To give another example from the previous day, the theme was that of the “Crumby theme”, where the words included CRACKERS, ANIMAL, SALTINE as part of the saltine crackers. Therefore, the main learning takeaway is the plethora of the overall themes and words that are part of the morning hours of the next day. What in many ways enriches the experience and motivates the players to keep playing is that the strand ranges in overall theme and secrets that players do not forget which coupon to use in the morning after the handwork of the night before; in addition, one learns new words and the themes around which they could be built.