Strands
Looking for Monday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Not quite at the middle of the week here yet, but it’s time for another Strands puzzle before you begin your daily grind. This is a bit of a fun one, even if it’s sort of out of season for it. You’ll see.
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. 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?
There is an official hint and then a hint that I’m going to give you after the fact. Today I don’t think I’m going to be that helpful and instead just rule something out you may be thinking. The official hint is:
Can I have my quarter back?
My hint is:
Not arcade games
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Now we head to the spangram and answer portion of the post, so it’s spoiler time if you don’t want to know any more past my custom hint. We will start with the spangram first, which is actually the last thing I found today, somehow:
TEAMPLAYERS
Yes that’s supposed to be two words, but it’s still a bit weird compared to the answers. Here’s where it sits on the board:
Strands
And the actual answers:
- COWBOY
- DOLPHIN
- RAVEN
- PATRIOT
- TITAN
- PANTHER
Strands
So, as you may know, these are all NFL team names, minus the “S” that normally sits on the end of all of them. I guess throwing six extra Ss in there would have made the puzzle a little messy. I don’t get the spangram. TEAMPLAYERS? I mean, they’re teams, but they’re not literal players. Anyway, I guess I got it.
Once I saw RAVEN that confirmed my suspicion about the “quarter back” theme, so then it was just a matter of hunting down other teams. I figured of all teams, the PATRIOTs were probably there, and while I looked for my Lions home team, or my Bengals adopted team, neither were there. Boo.
A balance between hard and easy today I’d say. Not really too far one way or the other. Hopefully the hints and answers helped.
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