Looking for Monday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Welcome to Tuesday’s Strands where we may end up setting a record, if I’m doing my math correctly around today’s puzzle.
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 then I’ll do one myself to help you along. The NYT hint is:
Beast mode
And mine is:
Not a workout
That may be able to get you started.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Time to move on to actual answers starting with what I think may be the longest actual spangram I’ve ever seen. It is:
CREATUREFEATURE
And it is here on the board:
And the rest of the answers are:
- HAIR
- HORN
- FEATHER
- SCALE
- WING
- TAIL
- SHELL
Okay most of these are pretty good but I mean, we all have hair, right? I guess FUR would have been too short. But yes I do think CREATURE FEATURE may be the longest spangram we’ve had as that is 15 letters by itself and taking up huge chunk of the puzzle. I did find creature early on, but I could not figure out the rest of it until I understood with fewer letters that it would be a rhyming matching word. Pretty neat they made that fit.
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