Strands: Sports Edition, our newest daily game offering at The Athletic, is a fun and easy-to-learn puzzler that we hope earns a spot in your regular rotation. We have plenty of reasons to make that case, but the best way to make the judgment for yourself is to play it. You can play today’s puzzle here.
If you want some help getting started, keep reading. Whether you’re a newbie or an experienced gamer, these tips will be useful. Much of this will be familiar if you’re a fan of Strands, as run by our friends at the Games team at The New York Times, but we do have some quirks in Sports Edition that they don’t.
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Let’s start by speedrunning the basics: We’ll give you a clue and a grid of 48 letters, arranged in six columns and eight rows. You’ll string letters together to form words, some of which will reveal the puzzle’s theme terms. A special term known as the “spangram” reflects the subject of the puzzle itself and touches opposite sides of the board (so either left to right or top to bottom, or both). When you find the spangram and all theme terms, they’ll have used all 48 letters in the grid exactly once each. Congratulations, you’re a winner! Share your solve, brag about it, take that mojo with you the rest of your day.
If you’re stumped, or if Spelling Bee habits motivate you to find as many words as possible, trace other words of at least four letters each to generate hints.
Now, let’s go through a puzzle together to show some of these elements in more detail.
Game layout
Here’s the board for our first puzzle. Don’t worry about spoilers because this puzzle was released Monday and has already had its time in the sun. As promised, 48 letters in our 6-by-8 rectangular grid. (This is the desktop view; the mobile version has a more vertical layout with the hint button underneath the grid.)
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Today’s Theme is the section where we put our clue for the puzzle. Here, it’s “After the snap.” A little secret, as noted by Zack Pierce as we were constructing these first sets of puzzles, is that the clue is often one of the best places for us to control the difficulty of a puzzle. “After the snap” for Puzzle No. 1 is on the easier side, especially if you watch the most popular sport in the United States.
The Hint button will be grayed out when you first see it. And to measure your progress, you’ll see a note of how many theme words you’ve found.
Besides the game itself, you’ll also see a circled question mark in the upper right-hand corner. Click it, and you’ll get options for game instructions, plus spots to send us feedback.
Submitting words
Words in Strands are made up of letters that are directly adjacent to one another. Don’t try clicking letters at random around the grid — they must be next to each other to be strung together. A letter near the middle of the grid will have eight valid neighbors to click next: the four orthogonal letters at its north, south, east and west, plus the four diagonals.
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You can make words in two ways. Dragging from the first letter to the last while tracing each letter along the way will string them together and submit the word once you stop dragging. You can also click or tap each letter individually, then submit the word by double-tapping on the last letter. We find that dragging is faster, while tapping is a little easier when you’re less certain of where the word is heading.
When you find a word, you’ll see it come up at the top of the puzzle, and it’ll either credit you toward a hint or one of the thematic answers.
Theme terms
When you find theme terms on the board, they will highlight in green. We’re saying “term” intentionally here, because a term in Strands: Sports Edition can sometimes be a short phrase. FIELDGOAL could appear as one term just as easily as FIELD or GOAL (and if FIELDGOAL is a theme term, you can also use FIELD and GOAL as separate hint words).
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There are two other important notes on theme terms.
One is that they can be proper names. JAMES in a puzzle to refer to LeBron James, AITANA in a puzzle that refers to Aitana Bonmatí, DODGERS the team or DODGER the stadium — consider it all fair game. Spelling is crucial: If you’re entering a name you think must be one of the theme words, but it’s not working, make sure you have the right letters in the right order. (Proper names aren’t usable as hint words; that would be too chaotic, even for us.)
Additionally, and this is important to remember, theme terms, like other words, might cross themselves on their own path. This is a bit of a polarizing feature, and it’s an uncommon move in the Times version of Strands, even though it is allowed. But consider it fair game and in play.
These rules can sometimes up the difficulty of the puzzles. But we think that’s a fair tradeoff for your knowing each day that the puzzle will have something to do with sports. Plus, the added twists will make you a better word searcher, and it’ll make your solves all the more satisfying.
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And we’ll avoid the evil move of intertwining terms with one another, even though I’ve definitely wanted to do that.
Spangrams
Each puzzle comes with a spangram that will light up in a lovely golden orange hue when you unearth it. The spangram is counted alongside the theme terms in the running tally, but it carries a special role and rules.
On the technical front, the spangram must touch two opposite sides of the board. Importantly, that doesn’t mean the first and last letters have to be on an edge, just that the term must make that crossing. If a term touches two sides but they’re not opposite to one another, then it’s not a spangram. And spangrams can touch three or four sides; that’s fine, too.
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From a word standpoint, the spangram will in some way describe the theme of the puzzle. Think of it like the subheading for the words themselves. BASKETBALL could be a spangram for DRIBBLE, PASS and SHOOT. Not all spangrams will be that easy or obvious, but they will fit the puzzle thematically.
Hints
Every three words you find generate the option to use a hint. When you click the hint button, the letters of one of the theme terms will get an outline. If needed, you can click the hint button again to show a nifty animation of the ordering of the letters.
Don’t sweat taking hints; if you stare at any combination of letters long enough, they all start to look bizarre.
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A good strategy when playing is to keep submitting words when you see them, even if you have a hint already banked. The additional words will count toward your second or third hint. Also, don’t worry about running out of words — each grid, we’ve found, generally contains hundreds of possible words. It’s quite doable to take the maximum number of hints for every puzzle.
Sharing, puzzle timing and questions
Once you finish your puzzle, you’ll see an ending screen with a summary of your performance, plus the options to share and also to admire your puzzle.
We hope you’ll do both, of course, and spend some time with our other offerings.
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New puzzles will hit you at midnight each night in your local time zone, so they’ll be ready for you whenever you prefer to play.
Ready to play? Here’s today’s puzzle. And here’s our Play hub with all our games.
We’re excited to see how you respond. Questions? Comments? Feel free to leave one below, and we’ll answer, or if you’d like, you can also email Oskar Garcia at ogarcia@theathletic.com. Happy puzzling.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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