Looking for Friday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Time to start your weekend with a new Strands puzzle that may prove to be on the tougher side.
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 move on to one that I craft myself to make things a bit more clear. The official hint is
Did you hear that?
And my hint is:
Audible words
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Time to start with the spangram, then the full list of answers after that. The spangram is:
SOUND EFFECTS
And is found on the board here:
The full answer list is:
- CRUNCH
- SIZZLE
- CRASH
- JINGLE
- KAPOW
- HONK
- BANG
I’m not going to lie, this may have actually helped set my all-time speed record for Strands. I don’t know why but this puzzle just really clicked for me the moment I got the first word, CRUNCH, which I was initially going to use as a hint. But once that hit, I got what they were going for and I tried to think of every sound it makes when Batman punches people in his ‘60s TV show.
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