How to Play Strands: Rules, Spangram & Strategy Tips

The rules of Strands

Every Strands board is an 8-row by 6-column grid of letters — 48 tiles in total. Above the grid sits one official clue, which names the theme without spelling it out directly. Your job is to trace a set of theme words hidden in the grid by connecting adjacent letters — up, down, sideways, or diagonally — in one unbroken chain per word.

Two rules make Strands different from a typical word search. First, every single letter in the grid belongs to either a theme word or the spangram — when you finish, there are no leftover tiles. Second, theme words never overlap or cross each other; each tile is used by exactly one answer. The grid isn't padded with filler letters the way a word search is: it's a tightly packed arrangement where the theme words and the spangram between them account for all 48 tiles.

You aren't limited to words on the theme list, either. Tracing any valid dictionary word of four or more letters highlights it briefly, even if it has nothing to do with the theme — and, as the scoring section below covers, doing this is how you earn hints.

What is a spangram?

One special theme entry in every puzzle is the spangram: a word or short phrase that spans the entire board, touching two opposite edges — left-to-right or top-to-bottom, never corner to corner. It's usually the longest answer on the board, and it almost always names or strongly hints at the theme that ties the other words together. Once you spot it, the rest of the puzzle tends to open up fast, because you already know what you're looking for.

There's more to the spangram than fits here, including how it can bend and double back through the grid rather than running in a straight line — see what is a spangram? for the full breakdown, with real examples of how its path behaves on the board.

Scoring and hints in the official game

Strands doesn't penalize you for guessing wrong the way Connections does — there's no mistake counter and no way to lose. Hints, instead, are something you earn. Every time you trace three valid non-theme words (any dictionary word of four-plus letters that isn't part of the puzzle's answer set), the game credits you with one hint.

Cashing in a hint doesn't hand you an answer outright. It highlights the letters that make up one theme word you haven't found yet, so you know exactly where it sits on the board — you still have to trace the correct path through those tiles yourself. There's no cap on how many hints you can earn; keep finding non-theme words and the hint meter keeps filling.

Because there's no penalty either way, there's no wrong way to play: some solvers try to finish without ever cashing in a hint, others lean on them from the first minute. Both finish the same puzzle.

6 tips for solving Strands faster

A few habits consistently speed up a solve, whether you're new to Strands or trying to shave your time down:

1. Start at the corners. Corner tiles connect to only three neighbors instead of eight, so a theme word that touches one is far more constrained — and easier to test — than one buried in the grid's center.
2. Bank short words early. Four-letter words are the fastest route to your first hint, and you don't need to know anything about the theme to find them — just scan for common short combinations.
3. Read the clue like wordplay, not a label. The official clue is usually a pun, a double meaning, or an indirect description of the theme rather than a plain topic name — take it literally and you'll often miss the angle.
4. Trace in every direction, including backward. Paths can run diagonally, double back on themselves, and change direction mid-word; don't assume an answer reads left-to-right just because that's where it starts.
5. Watch for a word reaching two opposite edges before committing to it as a regular theme word — that's your spangram, and finding it early tells you the theme outright.
6. Save hints for when you're stuck, not the moment they're available. A hint only reveals a word's location, not its letters or its connection to the theme, so it's most useful once you already have a partial read on the puzzle.

More NYT puzzle guides

Strands is one of three daily puzzles TodayHint covers. If you're working through the full set, see how to play Connections for the category-sorting game with its yellow-to-purple difficulty order, or how to play Pips for the newer domino-placement puzzle. Once you've got the rules down, the Strands answers archive holds every past puzzle if you want to check a previous day's spangram or practice on an older board.