Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
It’s time for a little bit of Sunday strands before brunch or maybe church, depending on what you have planned. This is one of the more unique puzzles I think I’ve ever seen from the game, and I am curious to see what you make of it. 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 where I’m not even sure I can type it out here, but we will see what happens. I may need to just do a screenshot:
Yeah my CMS wouldn’t even let me post all these, so there’s the screenshot instead. My own hint for this would just be:
Describe them
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
We will start with the spangram, something you may be able to guess pretty easily this time, given what you can see here. Scroll slowly, as now the real answers begin. The spangram is:
EMOJIS
Here’s where that’s located on the board:
Now we can move on to the actual list of answers:
- SPARKLE
- ROSE
- FIRE
- SKULL
- EYES
- BOUQUET
- STARSTRUCK
Three different four letter words here, which is something you almost never seen in Strands given that four letter words are usually saved for hints. I think I was overthinking this at first, I was trying to puzzle out if this whole thing was some sort of secret phrase, but instead it was just asking you to describe each emoji.
Some of these were really straightforward. One was confusing because you would think STARS was STARS but it was SPARKLE and the STARS is part of STARSTRUCK instead. It also took me a minute to figure out how to spell BOUQUET. That’s more Us than I thought there would be.
In any case, a really unique puzzle this week and I enjoy them thinking outside of the box like this. I hope we see more things like this in the future.
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