Looking for Wednesday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them Where:
Welcome back to another installment of Strands hints, where I give you strands hints. And the spangram answer. And all the answers if you really want those as well. It’s cool, we all need some help. 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?
Scroll slowly! We will now start to reach spoiler territory with the official hint first, then my own hint which may boost you along a little further. The official hint for Strands today is:
It’s all in your head
Any my own hint will be somewhat similar:
Visualize
Hopefully that can get you started as you can find a few and unravel the Strands puzzle from there.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we move onto the actual answers to the puzzle, and we will start with the spangram if that’s all you think that you want to know before finding the rest of the puzzle’s words. Spoilers follow, and here’s the spangram
MAKEBELIEVE
Here’s where that sits on the board, top to bottom. Pretty long word today with eleven letters by itself.
Here are all the other words that will make up the rest of the answers which follow the hint and spangram theme:
REVERIE
FIGMENT
DAYDREAM
ILLUSION
FANTASY
So, pretty long words this week, plus the spangram, which is why I suppose there are only five listed here. Some of these are a bit tough, like do you know what a REVERIE is? A “an instrumental piece suggesting a dreamy or musing state”? Well, there you go. That was hard to find out of all of these.
Essentially the idea is just that, ideas, things you can only picture in you mind, whether they are delusional or just nice dreams. Illusion is a bit weird as that is a bit more like witnessing a magic trick rather than something you’re thinking about, but I guess it fits with the theme.
I figured out MAKEBELIEVE pretty quickly this time around although winding it all around the board like that took a couple tries. That led to the rest and hopefully that’s true of you as well, with a few additional hints here. Hope you enjoyed it.
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