Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Time for another weekend Strands. This puzzle started out as impossibly easy, but by the end I was thoroughly confused and took forever on the final, very long word. Let’s see how you do.
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?
We will start with the NYT official hint and I will then invent one of my own to push you further. Their hint is:
Way to grow!
My hint is:
Not plant names
Yeah I figured I would get that out of the way up front, considering their clue pretty clearly says where we’re going.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
The answers to the puzzle today are broken into two parts, first the spangram then the actual answers below that. Here is the spangram:
Gardening
And here is where you will find that on the board:
Now we can go fill in the rest of the answers, which are:
- SUNLIGHT
- SPACE
- EARTH
- LOVE
- WATER
- SEEDS
- PROTECTION
Wow, eight wards today, that’s unusual. I guess that’s because some of them were just four letters, which are usually saved for hints, not answers.
I got LOVE first which was confusing as I thought maybe it was just all abstract concepts that can grow, like love, but I guess the idea is that plants need love to grow, according to plant mythology.
And LOVE takes the form of all the other steps, which were pretty straightforward except for the final, super long word, PROTECTION which took me a solid 15 minutes and even online unscramblers weren’t helping me. I guess that’s like what, a greenhouse? A feel like a lot of plants don’t need literal protection but whatever. Hope you enjoyed the puzzle.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
