Looking for Monday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here.
New Strands puzzle today and this is a topic close to my heart so I am really excited to share it with you.
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?
We will start with the official hint and move to one that I make on my own for an extra boost. The official hint is:
Spacing out
And mine is:
Literature genre
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
The spangram will be first and then I will do the full list of answers after that. The spangram is:
SCIENCEFICTION
And that is found on the board here:
Certainly one of the longer spangrams we’ve had. The answer list is below:
- MARTIAN
- ALIEN
- ROBOT
- CYBORG
- MUTANT
- DROID
So, we have essentially three words for machines, DROID, ROBOT and CYBORG. When I saw DROID I thought this may end up being specific to Star Wars, as that popularized the term, but it was not.
Then we have two for aliens, ALIEN and MARTIAN. Meanwhile MUTANT gets us more into X-Men territory, though it is hardly the only piece of fiction to use that term. I love sci-fi but I did get stuck at the bottom with MUTANT and CYBORG being tangled up.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
