Looking for Wednesday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
It’s the end of the week so why not close things out with a game of Strands? Actually, this one is a lot more relevant to Fridays than I figured it would be, which will make sense in a minute. 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.
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 official hint and then I will move on to one of my own to help you out a bit more. Here is the official hint for the puzzle:
Raise a glass
And my own hint
No beers, no wine
Yeah I think that’s going to help quite a bit.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Scroll slowly! We will start with the spangram and then move on to the longer list of answers after that. The spangram is:
COCKTAILS
And here is where that is on the board:
Then we move on to the full list of answers which are a bounty of drinks that sound good right now:
- MARGARITA
- GIMLET
- SPRITZ
- MOHITO
- DAIQUIRI
A bit on the lighter side but hey, not too bad. The clue here was pretty straightforward so once I knew it was not going to be beers or wines or straight liquor like whiskey, I figured out the whole cocktail bit.
The only thing I really struggled with was remembering that DAQUIRI had an extra I in the front there. The rest of them flowed shortly thereafter. Fun puzzle today and I hope you can go grab one of these for yourself now.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
