Regardless of how you tend to approach other games, give yourself a trial period at the outset: Take it slow, see if any words jump out and don’t be afraid to use hints when you’re stuck. Unlike Connections or Wordle, there’s no final turn in Strands, so you can experiment to figure out what sticks for you. Later, you can develop a personalized approach like Peter Blair, an editor for The Times, who designed a scoring system for Connections so athletic that I can’t believe he still has fun while playing. Or maybe you’re more like Isaac Aronow, an editor on the Games desk who settled on taking a purely aesthetic approach to Wordle. That’s just different strokes for different folks! Or different Strands in different hands, in this case.

Yes, there are Easter eggs.

Strands features its fair share of coincidences, given how many ways a board’s letters can be connected — but on occasion, you may also discover a purposefully inserted Easter egg. In a recent puzzle with the spangram BROADWAY, for instance, about well-known musicals, the board was designed so that its spangram ran down it in the shape of the namesake street in Manhattan.

Don’t sweat any false starts, though. The level of difficulty of any given board has far more to do with the connection between the puzzle’s title and its theme than anything else. Ms. Bennett said that she never included red herrings on purpose. But, she added, “I’ve seen them happen.” If solvers happened to find any adjacent theme material in the board, she said, they could simply appreciate it as “a freebie.”

Play means fun, so make sure to have some.

That playing a game should be fun may seem like a foregone conclusion, but with all of the brilliant, creative and perfection-driven solvers out there, it bears repeating. There’s no penalty for endless guessing on Strands, nor is there one for using hints. And believe me, I get it: My personal approach to any Times game is similar to the way I ride my bike or walk around in New York City in that, moments after beginning the activity, I suddenly feel the need to overtake everyone in my path. When did it become a competition? I don’t know.

Reed Kavner, a comedy producer in New York City, keeps the spirit of play alive by exchanging his results with his mother via text every day. “We started trading Wordle results in 2021, and then I got her into Connections and Strands, too,” Mr. Kavner said. “She’s become a more dedicated player than I am now.”

Mr. Kavner said that both he and his mother tried to avoid hints as a matter of “personal pride and satisfaction,” and they tended to notice who found the spangram faster. But, he added, the game felt chiefly like an opportunity to check in with each another from afar: “It’s mostly just a way to say hi and feel connected.”