Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Time to use Strands for a bit of self-care today, which also happens to align with the actual theme.
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.”
Play Puzzles & Games on Forbes
What Is Today’s Strands Hint?
Time to do the NYT hint and then my own hint after that:
You’re styling!
And mine is:
Look your best
Today’s NYT Strands Opening Letters
Here are the first two letters of all the words if you don’t want the entire thing just yet.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we begin the answer portion of the program which is the spangram and the full list of the other answers, the spangram is:
BEAUTYSALON
Here it is on the page, and read on:
The answers are:
- FACIAL
- EXTENSIONS
- HAIRCUT
- WAXING
- BRAIDING
I won’t lie, this was a tough one for me, as almost all of these things are simply not in my wheelhouse except for one: haircut. That one’s pretty straightforward. I got TENSION and TENSIONS as hints out of EXTENSIONS and BRAID out of BRAIDING, so that helped move things along. I got BEAUTY pretty easily as part of the spangram but I couldn’t figure out where it went from there until later. How did you fare?
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