Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
Want more word-based fun? Then check out my Wordle today, NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
- VINE
- TRIM
- TIME
- MICE
- BONE
- PHONE
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
The answers to today’s Strands, game #264, are…
- BEND
- MOBILE
- BUFFALO
- RIVERSIDE
- PHOENIX
- BOULDER
- SPANGRAM: CITYNAME
- My rating: Stupid
- My score: 2 hints
There are approximately 10,000 cities in the world. There are at least a few hundred in the US alone, depending on how you define a city. And the task the NYT gave us today for Strands? Name six of them. That’s all. No theme or connection between them. Nothing clever, like they’re all names that are also animals (like BUFFALO and to an extent PHOENIX) or names that are also TV shows (RIVERSIDE) or names that are geological features (BOULDER) or whatever. Just six CITYNAMEs, all of them in the US.
I suppose the only thing that does link them is that they are all something other than just proper nouns; by that measure New York or Miami or Chicago would not work. But all the same, it’s stretching things a bit to call CITYNAME a unifying theme.
That lack of a real concept behind it made it difficult to solve. I got BEND and then MOBILE first, and neither particularly screamed ‘You need to list US city names’ to me, even when taking into account the theme clue of ‘This is the place!’. Yes, I know that both are cities, and it even occured to me as a possible connection, but I dismissed it as silly. Little did I know…
How did you do today? Send me an email and let me know.
- POKER
- CHIMNEY
- BROOM
- FLUE
- HEARTH
- SCREEN
- MANTEL
- SPANGRAM: FIREPLACE