Welcome to Strands: Sports Edition, The Athletic’s newest daily game

Ready for a new daily challenge of your sports knowledge and word-finding skills? We’re pleased to bring you Strands: Sports Edition, our version of the highly popular offering from the New York Times Games team. You can play now here, and we’re releasing a puzzle each day at midnight in your local time zone.

The basics are easy: You’re looking for thematic terms in a grid of 48 letters that is arranged in six columns and eight rows. One term, called a spangram, will touch opposite ends of the grid and describes the puzzle’s theme.

Sounds like a simple word search, right? That’s true, and yet the simplicity masks the format’s ample room for deception. Combine it with the world of sports and you’re in for a fun challenge.

In Strands: Sports Edition, terms can be proper names for athletes, teams, leagues or many other things. Perhaps you can identify stars like WEMBANYAMA or OSAKA, but are you sure you can spell them correctly, or that you’ll find them easily if the letters are bunched together in a less than obvious configuration?

Congratulations, you found FOUL. Is this a puzzle about basketball, softball or some other sport? Or could it be a grid of words that have different meanings in multiple sports?

We also allow for theme terms that can be short phrases, like SPLITSTEP or ONEHOPPER, because they are common. And to call it out now, terms can sometimes cross themselves diagonally, which we know makes for a trickier solve.

Expect lots of variety, stemming from constructors who each have a little bit of a different flair with sports, puzzle games and fun. Our favorites so far combine a satisfying mix of trivia and logic for handcrafted grids that become their own windows into the many things you love about sports.

Here are a few other reflections on why we hope you’ll make this game a part of your puzzle routine.

Testing your sports love

In our first weeks creating these puzzles, we’re already realizing the fun potential. We’ll have puzzles focused on standard themes like leagues, cities, teams and individual players, plus more creative themes that pull words from several different sports or sports-centric pop culture like movies, music and more.

As Oskar noted, the puzzles will test your spelling. They will also test your depth of knowledge on certain topics, as the rules of the game limit the specific combinations of words we can use. Each board must be exactly 48 letters and each theme word must only have one traceable path on the board, which means we can’t always use all of the most obvious words for a certain theme. A puzzle about SportsCenter anchors, for instance, can’t have both OLBERMANN and BERMAN because the latter is also traceable within the former. A puzzle with, say, names of men’s tennis legends would have to exclude at least one of the seven with 11 Grand Slam titles or more due to the character count — and that’s before we get to Connors, Lendl, Agassi or McEnroe.

We hope you have as much fun with these as we had making them. Thanks, and happy playing.

– Zack Pierce

Expanding The Athletic’s games universe

A little more than two years ago, we launched Connections: Sports Edition as a sort of test. Many sports fans — including the three of us — love games and trivia, too, and what if we could provide a daily game alongside the rest of our daily report on the sports world? Nearly 750 puzzles later, many of you have made it part of your routine, whether you play solo, discuss with your friends, or come to our hints forum to share your score. (As I wrote back then, it’s become such a part of my routine that I’m now constantly seeing things in groups of four as I watch sports.)

The response has been so overwhelming that we are often talking about more ways we can create games to play alongside the games we cover. Strands: Sports Edition was a natural fit — as Zack wrote, the game’s setup is flexible enough that we’ll be able to tackle all sorts of themes and sports — just like we do with the sports edition of Connections.

There is something special about a daily game, many of which are a part of my routine, too. A chance to test your brain. An “a-ha!” moment that sparks joy when you solve and supplies some extra pep in your morning. A frustrated text to the group chat to lament when something has you stumped. Then, a fresh chance tomorrow.

We want The Athletic to be a place you can come play, compete, discuss and have fun — and maybe take home some new knowledge in the process. You can find Strands: Sports Edition by pressing on the “Play” icon in the app — where you’ll also find Connections (Sports and Soccer Editions), our weekly news quiz, and our NFL and Premier League prediction games.

— Mark Cooper

A side door into the sports world

We talk a lot in our newsroom about curiosity, about wanting to be there for you in moments when you want to dive deeply and also as you want to maintain a broader familiarity with what’s going on across sports. We think Strands: Sports Edition does a good job of testing both of those things, a bit like our weekly news quiz, a bit like Connections: Sports Edition, but in its own unorthodox way.

Letting trivia and logic intersect means we can test both whether you know something and whether you can deduce it, or whether you know something so well that we can use that knowledge to lead you down an obvious, though ultimately incorrect path. And if you don’t know something, can you get there anyway? Strands is a wonderful game for those dynamics because you’re never out of it: unlike Connections: Sports Edition or Wordle, you don’t run out of chances to complete the puzzle.

We think that hits at the broader but not always apparent fact that people are drawn to sports for numerous different reasons. That means, we think and hope, that Strands has a chance to scratch those itches in a variety of ways.

– Oskar Garcia

Ready to play? Here’s today’s puzzle.

If you have any questions about Strands: Sports Edition as you get started, please feel free to reach out to us, either through the comments below or via email at ogarcia@theathletic.com.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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