The basics
Every day you get:
- A square grid of letters (usually 6×6, occasionally 7×7 or 4×4).
- A single theme clue — just a word or short phrase, for example "It's a jungle out there" or "Let's play".
Your job is to find a set of theme words hidden in the grid. Every theme word relates to that clue in some way.
How to trace a word
- Tap or click the first letter of the word.
- Drag to each subsequent letter. Letters must be adjacent — that means sharing an edge or a corner (8 directions: up, down, left, right, and the four diagonals).
- You cannot reuse a letter inside the same word.
- Release to submit. If the word is one of the theme answers, it highlights in the theme color.
This is what makes Strands trickier than a classic word search: words can zig-zag diagonally across each other, and letters can be shared between different theme words (just not within one word).
The spangram
One of the theme words — printed in gold — is the spangram. Its path touches two opposite edges of the board:
- Top edge and bottom edge, or
- Left edge and right edge.
The spangram usually captures the theme most directly. Finding it first is often the key to the whole puzzle because it reveals where the other words hide. On strandssolver.org, the Spangram candidates panel automatically flags every word whose traced path touches two opposite edges — use it to spot the gold word quickly.
Hints and scoring
If you're stuck, you can spend hints. The in-game hint button highlights the starting letter of one theme word you haven't found yet. There's no hard penalty for using hints — your puzzle still completes — but the game tracks how many you used.
You'll also see a rating after finishing (often a phrase rather than stars), based on how many non-theme words you accidentally submitted vs. hints used.
The "non-theme words" trick
If you trace a valid English word that isn't a theme word, the game still accepts it. Submit several such words and you earn a hint on the house. The definition of "valid" is generous — three-letter words count, and plural forms usually do too. This is exactly where a solver comes in handy: feed the grid to the solver, scan its word list for easy non-theme words, and trade them in for free hints.
Tips for solving faster
- Find the spangram first. Look for words that span top-to-bottom or left-to-right.
- Look for rare letters. Q, X, Z, J, K anchor words — start there and extend in both directions.
- Watch for common suffixes. -ING, -ED, -ER, -TION, -LY. If you spot one, the word often extends backward from it.
- Don't ignore diagonal runs. Diagonal-only words are common in Strands even though they feel unusual from classic word searches.
- Use the solver as a checker. Found a word? Paste the grid and confirm it appears in the list before submitting (some candidates are valid English but just aren't on the official answer list for that day).
How does the solver figure out the words?
It walks every possible path through the grid, starting from each letter, and prunes paths that aren't the prefix of any real English word (using the ENABLE word list — the same public-domain list used by many word games). Every surviving path that matches a dictionary word is reported. The entire computation happens in your browser; nothing is uploaded.