Puzzle number 936 of The New York Times' Strands game took a notably different turn Friday, trading the format's usual wordplay and thematic red herrings for a grid built around basic multiplication, giving solvers a puzzle that felt more like a flashback to primary school math class than the typical vocabulary-driven Strands challenge.

Strands presents players with a six-by-eight grid of letters and asks them to find a set of words connected by a hidden theme, tracing each word in a continuous line that can bend around corners as it moves through the grid. One special word, known as the spangram, always touches two opposite sides of the board and summarizes what the rest of the puzzle's theme words have in common. Players can also tap or drag to select letters, and non-spangram theme words remain highlighted in blue once correctly identified.

For those still working through Friday's puzzle, the theme centers on numbers, specifically the kind produced by multiplying a whole number by itself. Every non-spangram answer in Friday's grid is a........

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