Looking for Tuesday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
It’s the middle of the week and we have an interesting Strands puzzle today to get you over the hump. It changed directions mid-run for me and I’m wondering if it will trip you up as well.
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?
Time to start with the official hint and then move on to a hint that I will craft myself to push further. Here is the NYT hint:
Spin your wheels
And my hint
Engine-less
We’ll see if that gets you anywhere.
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Spoilers ahead as we will start with the spangram and move on to the full list of answers if you need some help with a few of these. Lord knows I did. The spangram is:
BICYCLE
And that is found right here on the board:
And now we move on to the full list of answers which include:
- FRAME
- PEDAL
- BRAKE
- KICKSTAND
- FENDER
- SADDLE
- CHAIN
Well that was an interesting one. I saw BRAKE right away and then FENDER and I figured we were talking about cars so I starting looking for a whole lot of different car parts. But bikes and cars don’t share THAT many, so when I found CHAIN I figured out what was going on.
Do most bikes have fenders now? Isn’t that a thing that goes over the wheel? I thought most didn’t. Also, I didn’t realize a bike seat was called a SADDLE as I thought it was called, well, a bike seat. Tricky puzzle today.
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