Strand
Are you looking for Saturday’s Strands clues, spangrams and answers? You can find them here:
Today may be a rest day for some of you, but that doesn’t mean you have to give your brain a Sunday off. Play Strands and see if you can solve today’s tricky puzzle. But first:
How to play with strands
The New York Times’ Strands puzzle is a play on the classic word search, and since it’s currently in beta, it will only survive if enough people play it every day.
There’s a new Strands game to play every day. In the game, you’re presented with a 6 x 8 grid of letters. Your goal is to find groups of words that have something in common. You’ll get clues as to what the theme is. When you find a themed word, it will be highlighted in blue.
You will also need to find special words called spangrams, which show what words have in common. Spangrams connect two opposite sides of the board. Theme words are not proper nouns, but spangrams can be. When you find a spangram, it will be highlighted in yellow.
Beware: you’ll need to be careful.
“Some of the themes are fill-in-the-blank phrases, others are steps in a process, items that belong to the same category, synonyms or homonyms,” The New York Times points out. “Just as she changes the difficulty level of her Wordle puzzles over the course of a week, [Wordle and Strands editor Tracy] Bennett intends to throw the Strands solvers a curveball every now and then.”
What’s your Strand tip for today?
I’ll start with the official tip of the day from the New York Times, and then if theirs is too confusing, I’ll give you my own tip to give you an extra boost.
Cut and Color
In my case it looks like this:
Sparkling
I think this is pretty easy to get right away.
What is Strands’ answer today?
Here’s where the actual answer begins and where we get into spoiler territory. We’ll start with the Spangram and then move on to the rest. Spangram is:
Jewel Tone
Possibly the most ingenious Spangles I’ve ever seen because they form jewel shapes on the board. So much fun!
Strand
The rest of the answer probably won’t surprise you.
- Ruby
- sapphire
- garnet
- amethyst
- Ruby
- Emerald
Strand
All of the gems on there are pretty common, but there are some key gems missing, like Diamond. My first clue was Ruby and it went well from there. Amethyst was probably the hardest to remember how to spell, but after going round and round the letter board I finally got it.
The most creative part of this piece is the JEWELTONES spanglam. We got a hint of JEWEL early on, but didn’t know what it was meant to be until the very end. Could this be the first spanglam to ever fully unwind? Maybe.
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