Looking for Friday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here.
Welcome to the weekend, but just because it’s Saturday that doesn’t mean the daily quest to solve Strands puzzles ends. There’s an interesting one out today, and I’m here to give you some hints and answers if you need it. But first…
How To Play Strands
The New York Times’ Strands puzzle is a play on the classic word search. It’s in beta for now, which means it’ll only stick around if enough people play it every day.
There’s a new game of Strands to play every day. The game will present you with a six by eight grid of letters. The aim is to find a group of words that have something in common, and you’ll get a clue as to what that theme is. When you find a theme word, it will remain highlighted in blue.
You’ll also need to find a special word called a spangram. This tells you what the words have in common. The spangram links two opposite sides of the board. While the theme words will not be a proper name, the spangram can be a proper name. When you find the spangram, it will remain highlighted in yellow.
Every letter is used once in one of the theme words and spangram. You can connect letters vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and it’s possible to switch directions in the middle of a word. If you’re playing on a touchscreen, double tap the last letter to submit your guess.
If you find three valid words of at least four letters that are not part of the theme, you’ll unlock the Hint button. Clicking this will highlight the letters that make up one of the theme words.
Be warned: You’ll need to be on your toes. Sometimes you’ll need to fill the missing word(s) in a phrase. On other days, the game may revolve around synonyms or homophones. The difficulty will vary from day to day, and the puzzle creators will try to surprise you sometimes.
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
This is where the hints begin, both official and unofficial, so turn back now if you don’t want to dive into that.
The official hint for today’s Strands is:
Picture this
I will add one of my own to give you an extra nudge down the road. This is not an actual word in the puzzle:
Snapshot
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we head into true spoiler territory with the actual answers to the puzzle, but first starting with the spangram that goes from one end of the puzzle to the other.
Today’s spangram is:
Photography
It winds all around the puzzle as you might expect for something that’s a full eleven letters. Here’s how it fits into the puzzle:
Now we move to the actual answers where the rest of the words are:
- TRIPOD
- CAMERA
- FILTER
- LENS
- FLASH
- LIGHT
- TIMER
So, you can see that it’s essentially anything you need to use for photography, all pieces of a camera setup, and of course the actual camera itself.
I was able to get LIGHT on my own, which was pretty easy to spot, though I did LIGHTS before that which gave me a hint. I did use a good amount of hints as I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do something like TIMER or FILTER on my own. I thought at first it might be different styles of photography, but instead it turned out to be physical pieces of camera equipment instead.
This one I thought wasn’t too hard or too easy, somewhere in the middle. I thought the clue was relatively straightforward once you understood that it was physical objects, but I can see how it might trip people up.
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