Looking for Friday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
It’s the weekend and time for another shot at the latest New York Times puzzle game, Strands. Three of us here at Forbes will be writing rotating guides for the game on a weekly basis. Paul Tassi handled last week’s, and Kris Holt the week before.
Now it’s my turn to take a crack at the fun new word game, along with my daily Wordle guides, of course. Today’s was a bit tricky, but also fun because it brought me back to my thespian days. If you’re a Shakespeare fan, you’ll enjoy today’s puzzle. Jump below for clues and answers. You can check out my guide for today’s Wordle here.
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.
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
Scroll slowly! Just after the hint for today’s Strands puzzle, I’ll reveal what the answer words are.
The official theme hint for today’s Strand puzzle is Romeo and Juliet.
Here’s an extra hint to help guide you to the solution: No proper nouns.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Spoiler alert! Don’t scroll any further down the page until you’re ready to find out today’s Strands answers.
I’ll first tell you the spangram and show you where that is on the grid. I’ll then tell you the other words and show you how they fit in.
This is your final warning!
Today’s Strands spangram is . . .
STARCROSSED
Here’s where the Spangram is on the grid:
Once you find the Spangram it’s typically pretty easy to find the rest of the day’s words, but I had trouble with a couple of these. Here’s the full list:
- Feud
- Tragedy
- Tryst
- Balcony
- Kiss
- Poison
- Love
I made one mistake in today’s game but didn’t need to ask for any extra hints. I guessed “Loss” and while that fits pretty well into the overall theme of today’s Strands, it wasn’t an answer.
That’s okay! I still consider it a pretty good game, and it’s “Perfect!” score regardless. I haven’t worked out a really strong strategy yet for this game, but I do like to find the Spangram first if at all possible since it cordons off the rest of the grid into more digestible pieces. Today I found LOVE first. Then I looked for character and place names like verona and tried to find the obvious, shakespeare. I came across TRAGEDY second, and then found the Spangram, STARCROSSED. Even with that done, some of these were a bit tricky. BALCONY had me for a minute!
And that’s all, folks. Be sure to check out my blog for my daily Wordle guides as well as all my other writing about TV shows, streaming guides, movie reviews, video game coverage and much more. Thanks for stopping by!
