A new word game just dropped, and this one looks pretty fun. Strands is a new game from the New York Times, the same people who brought you Connections and Spelling Bee. (The NYT is also the current home of Wordle, and all of these games follow in the tradition of their iconic crossword, which the paper began publishing in 1942.)

Strands just launched yesterday, so right now you can play puzzle #2 today. New NYT games start out in a beta mode, available on the web but not yet in the NYT Games app (formerly the Crossword app). The direct link to play Strands is here.

How the board appears before you begin solving. Credit: Strands/NYT How do you play Strands?The short answer is: go to this link, where you can watch a tutorial that explains the gameplay. But if you want a sense of what youre getting into, read on.

The Strands board is a 6x8 grid of letters, and it looks like a small word search. You select words either by swiping your finger (or cursor) across the letters, or by tapping/clicking each letter. If you're using a touchscreen, you'll tap an extra time on the final letter to submit; using a mouse or trackpad, you simply have to take your finger off the button.

Unlike a word search:

There is no word bank to tell you which words youre searching for.

The words can twist and turn in any direction, including diagonally (like in the game Boggle).

Every letter on the board is part of a word. When youve found them all, the words will fully pack the grid.

Sound hard? It would be, if not for the theme and the hints, and the fact that mistakes dont count against you. Ill explain how all of that works, but first, lets talk about how to actually make your guesses.

What counts as a legal word in Strands?Here are some things youll need to know.

The minimum length of a word is four letters. There wont be any three-letter words.

As youre connecting the letters, you can go in any direction: up, down, left, right, or any diagonal.

Yep, diagonals are legal!

The letters wont (usually) be in a straight line. Expect plenty of twists and turns.

You cannot use the same letter on the board twice; once a letter is highlighted, you cant use it again.

That last point doesnt rule out repeated letters. It just means that when youre spelling COMMA, there will be two Ms on the board next to each other. (Contrast that with Spelling Bee, where you can tap the same letter twice.)

How do the themes work in Strands?Every puzzle has a theme, and when you first open a puzzle youll see a title that hints at the theme. For example, puzzle #1 was Mark my words. All of the words on the board match the theme, so we needed to find COMMA, PERIOD, APOSTROPHE, and others.

There will always be a theme-related word that connects two opposite sides of the puzzle. In #1, the word PUNCTUATION ran from top to bottom. This special word is called the spangram. (It will show up in yellow once you find it. The other words show up in blue.)

How do I get hints in Strands?I think the hint button is the cleverest part of Strands! Instead of offering you a way to give up or cheat, hints are built into the game. You have to earn your hints by guessing valid but incorrect words, so the harder the game, the more hints youll earn. Heres how this works.

The word COMMA highlighted on the Strands board (after using a hint) Credit: Strands/NYT How to earn hints in StrandsIf you find a dictionary word that is not part of the intended solution, your hints button will start to fill up. For example, in the punctuation puzzle, if you were to highlight the word SOLO (no relation to punctuation) youd see the grayed-out Hint button start to fill up like a progress bar. Three off-target words buy you one hint.

How to use hints in StrandsOnce your hint button has filled up, its ready to use. Press it, and one of the words you need to find will get dashed-line circles around all of its letters.

This tells you where the word is, and which letters it contains, but its still up to you to figure out how those letters should be connected.

That dashed-circle highlight will stay on the board until you get that word. Its fine to solve other words before you do the one the hint gave you. But if you earn more hints, they wont be accessible until you solve the hinted word.

How many mistakes do I get in Strands?Thats the other cool thingmistakes dont count against you! If you misspell a word as youre highlighting it, no harm no foul. If you spell out a dictionary word that isnt part of the theme, you start earning hints. And when you finish the game and get a little emoji recap, it only includes your correct findings and the number of hints you used.

What do the emojis mean in Strands?When you solve the puzzle, youll get one of those little emoji recaps of the game. It tells you the order in which you solved the words. There are three different icons:

Blue means you found a regular word.

Yellow means you found the spangram.

A lightbulb means you used a hint.

For example, heres mine from yesterday:

Strands #1 Mark my words And heres one from someone who needed a hint to get started:

Strands #1 Mark my words How do you win Strands?So thats gameplay. What about strategy?

First: know what youre dealing with. As I noted above, this is a brand-new game, so surely there will be surprises along the way. In the NYT article introducing the game, its editor, Tracy Bennett (who also edits Wordle) hints at some of what is to come:

Some themes [will be] fill-in-the-blank phrases. They may also be steps in a process, items that all belong to the same category, synonyms or homophones. Just as she varies the difficulty of Wordle puzzles within a week, Ms. Bennett plans to throw Strands solvers curveballs every once in a while.

This suggests we may see some of the same kinds of themes that make me want to throw my laptop out the window when I find them in Connections. (We all remember the one where STICK was included next to GLUE in a list of things that are sticky, right?)

As for tactics to use right now, I find that these things help:

Start guessing the theme early, and looking for the spangram. Besides revealing the theme, the spangram also splits the board into two smaller playing fields.

If you think you may have found a word, but cant quite make it, back up to the start and consider if the word youre looking for is in there somewhere. For example, when I first tried to spell PUNCTUATION, I had the correct starting place and the correct word in mind, but made a wrong turn. It took me a minute to realize that after N, there were two different letter Cs I could follow.

Anytime you find a word, ask yourself how this might relate to the puzzles title. With todays (#2) puzzle, the title mentions a she. After finding one of the non-spangram words, I racked my brain for what female celebrity, historical figure, or fictional character might be associated with that word. My first thought was Taylor Swift, but I couldn't see any other words related to her. My second thoughtaha! As soon as I got that, the theme was as good as solved.

Dont be afraid to make wrong guesses to earn hints. This gives you practice in finding words, and you may discover that by the time youve found three non-theme words, youve also found a theme word or two in the process.

Im excited to see where Strands goes from here. I wouldnt be surprised if the puzzles get a good bit harder once weve all caught on to the style of gameplay. Happy solving!