Lord help me, I’m incensed by a word game again. I swore I’d never let one of the New York Time’s casual daily puzzles get under my skin this bad after the infamous Wordle #409 (the word COYLY still makes me shudder) but here am I, writing a strongly worded response to NYT's masochistic puzzle master. To whom it may concern, how dare you.

The game that’s got me (and social media) all fired up is called Strands. NYT’s latest game has been in beta for about a week, and it’s already my favorite of the bunch. It’s a well-designed and unique puzzle that takes the familiarity of a word search and adds a thematic layer, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes light, quick word games like Wordle. Just not today’s. Don’t start with today’s.

If you haven’t tried it yet, here’s how it works. Letters are arranged in a 6x8 grid, and your task is to find all the words hidden within. Unlike a typical word search, the words you’re looking for aren’t in vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines - they’re hidden in twisty turny sequences that snake around and double back on themselves. This makes finding the correct words difficult, so there are a couple of additional features to help you. Each puzzle has a theme, which is a clue that connects all of the hidden words, and each puzzle has a spangram - a word that spans across the entire puzzle from left to right or top to bottom that reveals what the entire puzzle is about.

Because the words in Strands can be in any orientation, there’s a lot of incorrect words to find too. For every three incorrect words you find you’ll unlock a hint that will show you the letters that make up one of the correct words.

Every letter in the puzzle is part of a word, so the more words you find, the easier it is to isolate and identify the remaining words. This is what makes Strands so satisfying: each word you find gives you more information to find the rest. Like crossword puzzles, the blank page is intimidating, but as you whittle away at individual words, the whole picture eventually comes into focus.

Or at least, that’s how it usually works. Take Monday’s puzzle for example. The theme of the day was “To put it mildly”, which doesn’t give much. You might start to figure out what it’s going for after finding a couple of the hidden words, like ‘jeepers’, ‘fudge’, and 'gadzooks’. Once you identify the spangram, ‘euphemisms’, the rest of the words should be easy to spot: ‘heck’, ‘darn’, 'shoot’, and ‘golly’, all euphemisms for curse words, or ways to put it mildly.

That’s been the typical difficult level of all the Strands so far, but Wednesday’s was very different. Finding some of the words did not help me find any of the others, which were seemingly unrelated to both the theme and the spangram. Even after solving the puzzle completely (with hints, the first time I’ve ever needed to use them) I still had no idea what the puzzle was about - and I’m not the only one.

I immediately went to Twitter to see if others were struggling, and I found countless tweets from people just as frustrated as I. The puzzle Tiktokers were also left scratching their heads at this one. Puzzletok - if you don’t know, now you do.

I finally understand it now, but let me lay it out to see if you can figure it out. The theme was ‘One thousand followers’ and the spangram was ‘grand finale’. The words were ‘jury’, ‘prize’, ‘piano’, ‘central’, ‘slam’, ‘canyon’, and ‘rapids’. If that makes sense to you, you’re a lot smarter than me and everyone else who went cross-eyed trying to put the clues together here.

I understand it now. ‘One thousand’ is the ‘grand’ in ‘grand finale’ and ‘followers’ is the ‘finale’, meaning you can put the word ‘grand’ in front of all the words in the puzzle. Grand jury, grand central, grand piano, grand slam. I could piece it together after the fact, but when I was just looking at ‘jury’, ‘prize’, and ‘piano’, there was just no way I was going to put those clues together. Even the Sunday crossword puzzle usually isn’t this esoteric.

I’m relieved that I’m not the only one who was mystified by this one, but I hope that, if Strands sticks around, future puzzles aren’t this rage-inducing. It was a little too clever for its own good. That’s likely a difficult line to walk for puzzle makers, but maybe the first week of a new game is a bit early to give players an inferiority complex - which is a term that would, ironically, make for a great Strands theme.

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