Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
No day of rest for us today, for there is another Strands puzzle to play and you can solve it over breakfast this Sunday morning. 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.
Be warned: You’ll need to be on your toes.
“Some themes are fill-in-the-blank phrases. They may also be steps in a process, items that all belong to the same category, synonyms or homophones,” The New York Times notes. “Just as she varies the difficulty of Wordle puzzles within a week, [Wordle and Strands editor Tracy] Bennett plans to throw Strands solvers curveballs every once in a while.”
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
We will do the NYT hint and then my own hint to push you further after that:
S-words? (A cutting edge theme)
And mine is:
Weapons
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we begin the answer portion of the program which is the spangram and the full list, the spangram is:
BLADES
Here’s where that is:
And the rest of the answers:
- CUTLASS
- RAPIER
- KATANA
- CLAYMORE
- SCIMITAR
- MACHETE
So the word “swords” is not in here at all, but these are all various types of blades or swords, though things like a MACHETE would not technically be classified as a sword. My years of playing medieval video games allowed me to do a perfect run on this puzzle, but I imagine it would be harder for some.
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