My dad and I have a Strands truce. He solves it at six in the morning with his first coffee, I solve it on the train at eight, and neither of us is allowed to text the other until both are done. This morning he broke the truce at 6:14 with a single message: "Sunday one is a stinker. Think Le Carré." That was all I got, and honestly, it was exactly the right amount of help. If you are here because Sunday's puzzle has you stuck, that is the spirit I want to solve it in with you: a nudge first, a bigger nudge second, and the full answers only when you ask for them.
This page covers NYT Strands #924 for Sunday, September 13, 2026. You will find the theme, a spoiler free hint, a stronger hint, the spangram, the full list of theme words, and a short note on how the board is laid out, plus some genuinely useful strategy for future puzzles at the end. Scroll slowly. Everything is arranged so you can stop at whatever level of help you want.
Today's Strands theme: "Top secret"
The theme The New York Times gives for Sunday, September 13 is "Top secret". The in game clue, revealed when you tap the hint button, is "Working secretly or in disguise" (Gadget Bridge, September 13, 2026). Puzzle #924 was constructed by Christina Iverson and edited by Tracy Bennett, the Times' Strands editor (NYT Crossword Answers, September 13, 2026). Several hint sites rated it hard, and my dad, who has a 400 plus day streak and no humility about it, agreed.
The theme is a little sly. "Top secret" makes you think of files, stamps, classified documents, vaults. The board is not about the secrets. It is about the people who keep and steal them.
Hint one: spoiler free
Think about the cast of a spy novel, not the plot. Every theme word is a noun for a person, and every one of them describes a different kind of secret worker. If you have watched a season of anything with a briefcase and a Berlin checkpoint, you already know all six words.
Hint two: a stronger nudge
- Two of the words also describe things you might find in a garden or a balance sheet. In this puzzle they mean people who have been placed somewhere on purpose.
- One of them is also a small burrowing animal. It is the shortest word on the board at four letters.
- One is the ordinary word for a spy, five letters, the one 007 is.
- One is a longer, more formal word for someone who carries out missions, nine letters.
- The longest theme word, ten letters, describes a spy whose job is catching other spies.
Spangram hint
The spangram is ten letters, starts with U, and is what a police officer is when they grow a beard and stop wearing the uniform. It runs horizontally, side to side across the board, along the fourth row (Gadget Bridge). If you find it first, the board splits into a top half and a bottom half, and the remaining words get much easier to fence in.
Today's Strands spangram
Last chance to look away.
The spangram for Strands #924 is UNDERCOVER.
It is, as one hint writer put it, about as on the nose as a spangram gets, and it is still satisfying to drag your finger across all ten letters and watch the row turn yellow (Gadget Bridge). Spangrams in Strands always touch two opposite edges of the grid and always describe the theme more directly than the theme title does. "Top secret" is the wink; "Undercover" is the answer to the wink.
NYT Strands answers for September 13, 2026
Here is the complete solution to puzzle #924. The six theme words, confirmed across multiple published solutions (Lifehacker, September 13, 2026; Sportskeeda, September 13, 2026), are:
| Answer | Letters | What it means in spy terms |
|---|---|---|
| AGENT | 5 | The general word for a spy or intelligence officer. Bond is an agent. So is the person who recruited him. |
| ASSET | 5 | A person inside an organisation who supplies information to an intelligence service, often without being a trained spy themselves. |
| MOLE | 4 | A spy who has burrowed into an enemy agency and works there, sometimes for years, while secretly reporting to the other side. Popularised by John le Carré, who claimed he did not invent it but certainly made it famous. |
| PLANT | 5 | Someone deliberately placed inside a group to spy or to feed it false information. |
| OPERATIVE | 9 | A person who carries out covert operations. The word intelligence agencies prefer because it sounds like a job title rather than a crime. |
| COUNTERSPY | 10 | A spy whose job is to detect and stop enemy spies. The mole hunter. |
| UNDERCOVER (spangram) | 10 | Working in disguise or under a false identity. The condition all six of the others share. |
Add the lengths together and you get 4 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 9 + 10 + 10 = 48. A Strands board is six columns by eight rows, 48 letters, and every letter is used exactly once (The New York Times, Strands). If your remaining unhighlighted letters do not spell something on this list, you have probably found a non theme word that happens to fit. That happened to me with the letters of PLANT; I had spent a full minute convinced there was a LATENT hiding in there.
Why today's puzzle felt hard
Three reasons, I think. First, the theme title points at documents and the words are all people, so the initial search sends you the wrong way. Second, the two ten letter words, COUNTERSPY and UNDERCOVER, share a lot of common letters, and until you have the spangram locked in it is easy to start tracing one and drift into the other. Third, ASSET, PLANT and MOLE all have very ordinary non spy meanings, so even when you see them on the board your brain does not flag them as theme words. My dad's "think Le Carré" hint worked because it forced the espionage frame before I started looking, which is exactly what the spangram would have done if I had found it first.
If you got there with two or three hints, you are in good company. Hard rated Sundays exist to be a small shared struggle. I like to think of the six a.m. and eight a.m. solves in my family as two people quietly working the same case.
How Strands works, if you are new
Strands is the New York Times' daily word search with a twist, launched in March 2024 and now a permanent part of the Games lineup alongside Wordle, Connections and the Mini (The New York Times Games). The rules, briefly:
- You are given a 6 by 8 grid of letters and a theme.
- Words are made by connecting adjacent letters in any direction, including diagonals, and the path can bend as often as it likes.
- Every letter on the board belongs to exactly one theme word or to the spangram. No letters are left over.
- The spangram describes the theme and touches two opposite sides of the board. It turns yellow when found; theme words turn blue.
- Finding any three valid non theme words of four letters or more earns one hint, which highlights the letters of one theme word without showing you the path.
- There is one puzzle a day, released at midnight local time, and you can play free without a subscription.
Five habits that make Strands easier
- Read the theme as a riddle, not a category. The title is written to mislead a little. "Top secret" was about people, not paper. Ask what the theme could mean sideways.
- Hunt the spangram first. It is the longest word, it touches two edges, and it splits the board into smaller regions. Scan the edges for a promising first or last letter.
- Bank hints early with junk words. Trace any three four letter words you can see before you commit to theme guesses. A hint in hand costs nothing and saves the streak on hard days.
- Count letters. When you have a few answers, add up the lengths and subtract from 48. Knowing you need exactly nine more letters tells you the remaining word is OPERATIVE, not AGENT.
- Look at the leftover shape. Unfound letters cluster together. If a blob of letters is sitting in a corner, the remaining word lives there, and it is usually shorter than you think.
Yesterday's Strands, in case you missed it
Saturday's puzzle, #923, was a gentler warm up before this one. If you are catching up, the New York Times keeps recent puzzles inside the Games app for subscribers, and most daily hint sites archive their write ups by date. We will keep our own archive growing here, one puzzle a day.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the Strands spangram today, September 13, 2026?
The spangram for Strands #924 is UNDERCOVER. It runs horizontally across the fourth row.
What are the Strands answers for September 13?
AGENT, ASSET, MOLE, PLANT, OPERATIVE and COUNTERSPY, plus the spangram UNDERCOVER. The theme is "Top secret".
What is the theme of today's Strands?
"Top secret", with the in game clue "Working secretly or in disguise". All the answers are words for different kinds of spy.
Is Strands free to play?
Yes. The daily Strands puzzle is free on the New York Times Games site and app. A Games subscription adds the archive and other puzzles.
What time does the new Strands puzzle come out?
At midnight in your local time zone, every day.
Sources: The New York Times Games, Strands; Gadget Bridge, "NYT Strands Hints And Answers For September 13", 2026; Lifehacker, "Today's NYT Strands Hints (and Answer) for Sunday, September 13, 2026"; Sportskeeda, "Today's Strands Hints and Clues for Top secret", September 13, 2026; NYT Crossword Answers, "NYT Strands September 13 2026 Answers". Strands is a trademark of The New York Times Company; Gazzed is not affiliated with the Times.
