Looking for Thursday's Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:
If you are looking for an exciting Strand puzzle today, you won't find it here, but not exactly in the way you think I might mean.
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 do the NYT hint and then my own hint after that:
- Boo-o-o-oring
And mine is:
- Cannot take much more of this
Today's NYT Strands Opening Letters
Here are the first two letters of all the words if you don't want the entire thing just yet.
- MU
- DR
- DU
- TI
- HU
What Are Today's Strands Answers?
Now we begin the answer portion of the program which is the spangram and the full list of the other answers, the spangram is:
WATCHINGPAINTDRY
Here it is on the page, and read on:
- MUNDANE
- DREARY
- HUMDRUM
- DULL
- TIRESome
Short puzzle based on the fact that this is a huge spangram almost going around the entire thing. Has that ever happened before? Going fully around it? I don't remember it happening. Anyway, the rest of these are largely long-ish words about being bored, with the only one that gave me trouble being Mundane as I just could not put those letters together to form anything coherent for a very long time.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.