Looking for Sunday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Time for a new work week to begin and then immediately slack off so you can head to the NYT site to play Strands. And Wordle. And Connections. Or do the entire crossword, whatever. But today we’re talking about Strands specifically, and some hints and answers
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?
Scroll slow. I’ll post the official hint and then make up one of my own to make things a bit more clear past what they’re already telling you.
The official theme hint for today’s Strand puzzle is…
World Piece
Alright I’ll do my own hint too:
Landscapes
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Spoilers follow. From here we will dive into the answers. If you just want the spangram, that’s below and that might be enough to get you started. But we will do the full answer list past that.
TERRAIN
That fits into the grid from one side to the other right here:
Alright and now here is the full list of answers:
MARSH
MOUNTAIN
SWAMP
PLAINS
FOREST
TUNDRA
DESERT
So, you get it right? These are all “pieces” that make up the world? Yeah, this was a pretty easy one, and it’s been sort of a pretty easy stretch of puzzles here, as I genuinely think that they have eased up on the gas a bit with these. I hope they get a bit harder in the future.
I found SWAMP first, then decided to do a hint because why not. That got me PLAINS, then I spotted the TERRAIN spangram which really hammered the theme home, making finding the rest of those pretty easy. I hope that they pick up the challenge from here.
We’ll see how things go. I hope you were able to breeze through this one, but if you didn’t, I suppose that may be why you’re here. Happy puzzling and we will see you back here tomorrow.
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