Looking for Saturday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
Sunday’s Strands is a bit astronomical, so it will be pretty easy if you’re into the science, pretty hard if you are not.
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?
We will start with the official hint and then move on to one that I craft myself to make things a bit more clear. The official hint is
Moonlighting
And my hint is:
____ New Year
What Are Today’s Strands Answers?
Scroll slowly, as this is where the answers being. We will first start with the spangram and then move on to the full list of answers after that. The spangram is:
PARTYGAMES
And here is where you find that on the board:
The answers are:
- WAXING
- WANING
- CRESCENT
- FULL
- QUARTER
- GIBBOUS
Alright I am not going to pretend that I knew what a Gibbous moon is without looking it up, and I learned that it’s pretty much wheen three quarters of the moon is showing with the rest of it in shadow. The others I think I got pretty well, and Waxing and Waning is how they’re progressing or regressing. No eclipse in there.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.