Need help with today's NYT strand? Today's theme, “The Strategy Game,” is very simple if you know the “game” it's playing.

Below are some tips to help you with Strand #243 and the answers when you need them. Start with a few tips to get the complete answer to Strand #243.

WARNING: There are spoilers for Strand #243.

The official theme of NYT Strands #243 is... “Strategy Games.”

And here's an unofficial hint from me: ”64 squares, 2 players, 1 winner.”

If you still don't get it, here are some useful words that give you valuable hint tokens:

Still having trouble? Spangram gives us a hint on conjunctions. Today, it starts with a 'C' and ends with an 'E'.

Scroll down to see what it is.

CHECKMATE.

Now, what's the answer to today's strand?

Drumroll, please.

... Spangram was CHECKMATE.

Strands #243

“Strategy Games”

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Hello Strands fans! Today's puzzle didn't present too many problems until I ran out of names for the chess pieces at the very end. The answers to the last two are a bit subtle, but we'll see.

I immediately knew it was a chess problem because I looked around for the “Q” and “U” at the bottom and sure enough, I found the word “queen”. Game on.

Sure enough, KING and PAWN are both to its right, and I quickly found ROOK, KNIGHT, and BISHOP all hovering around the top half of the board. This left enough room to fill the spangram, but it turned out to be CHECKMATE, not anything with “chess” on it.

I quickly ran through all the pieces in my head and realized that I had exhausted them all. Still, there were two answers on the left side of the board.

Thankfully, those two subtle words weren't too intertwined with each other, so it was very easy to separate the two. I first got TIMER and decided to decipher the anagram of DOBRA. It was, of course, BOARD.

Are you reading this late in the day? The full article on Strand's solution to yesterday's game #242 can be found here.