Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here.
Time for a little Sunday Strands and this is one rare puzzle where I truly did not understand the theme at all until the very end. Maybe you didn’t either. 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 start with the NYT hint and I will make one of my own after that to push you further. The official hint is:
Serve ginger-ly?
And mine is:
Asian recipe
We’ll see if that gets you anywhere.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
This is where answers begin so beware of spoilers if you don’t want to get this far. We will start with the spangram and the full list will come after. The spangram is
CALIFORNIAROLL
And it weaves all around the board like this:
The rest of the answers are as follows:
CUCUMBER
AVOCADO
CRAB
MAYO
RICE
SEAWEED
Okay look I get it now, but I did not understand as I went that these were the ingredients to make California sushi roll. Yes, I eat them, but I don’t order ginger with them. I thought this was foods that pair well with ginger or something, and I figured I didn’t have the cooking knowledge for that. I didn’t actually realize there was MAYO in California rolls anyway.
So what I had to do is just find food words by using an absolute ton of hints. I got many with the one section where you could do hint words like ROLL, CULL, MULL, BULL. There were a lot. How did you do on this puzzle? I thought it was pretty hard.
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