Today’s Strands hints and answers for Thursday 9th May

If Strands is being too much of a pain this Thursday, then we can help with the Strands answers for today, 9th May.

If you’re new to Strands, your goal with this particular New York Times daily puzzle is to find all of the theme words and a ‘Spangram’ in a wordsearch-like grid. All of the regular words relate to this Spangram, which is a word, or phrase, that you also have to find within the wordsearch.

To help you narrow down the theme and guess the related words, there is a theme sentence provided. With this clue, you then have to find all of the correct words that relate to it. The only catch is that your letters must be beside each other, so it’s easier to find words than in a regular wordsearch, as you can switch to any direction, but this also makes it more difficult to find the exact theme words, as there are so many options.

Thankfully, there is a hint system. For every word you submit that isn’t a theme word or Spangram, you make progress towards unlocking a hint. Once you unlock one, you can then press the hint button and the outline of a correct theme word will be highlighted.

It’s also important to note that Strands is currently in its beta stage, so some of these rules might change in the future upon its full release.

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Hints for today’s Strands answer

Instead of going straight to the answers, you might only need a few clues to help you get all theme words and the Spangram, so here’s some hints for today’s Strands:

• Today’s theme hint ‘Tap to play’ refers to terrain and obstacles you might find on a mini golf course.
• The Spangram starts on the third line, ends on the sixth line, and is eight letters long across two words.
• In total, there is one four-letter, two six-letter, one seven-letter, one eight-letter, and one nine-letter theme word to find.
• The nine-letter word is the name of water in nature when it falls down a vertical drop.
• One of the six-letter words is a type of huge building royalty and their staff might live in.

Strands answers for 9th May

Here’s the Strands answers for today:

• RAMP
• CASTLE
• TUNNEL
• BOULDER
• WINDMILL
• WATERFALL

Today’s Strands Spangram is ‘MINI GOLF’.

It took a lot of guesses to narrow down the Strands answers for me today, as I had no clue what the theme was until I got the Spangram at the very end. I’m not sure I would have sussed it out even if I was a mini golf regular. Hopefully the hints above helped you get today’s Strands answers quicker than me today!

What to play after Strands

You might have heard of this game called Wordle? It’s pretty good, we think it might stick around. If you’ve already solved that today, however, The New York Times does offer other games. When it comes to word-based games, there’s Connections, the Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee, and Letter Boxed. If you fancy a break from words, then you can also try Tiles, a motif matching game, or Sudoku.

Maybe you just want to keep playing Strands instead of making it a daily puzzle? In that case Strands Unlimited is the puzzle for you. There’s a few differences to the rules, but it’s basically just an almost never-ending stream of Strands puzzles to solve.

If you’re after something similar to Connections, however, then those in the UK might want to boot up the BBC iPlayer and play along with Only Connect, which came out many years before the daily NYT Connections puzzle, something host Victoria Coren Mitchell was quick to point out.

Puzzgrid is another Connections-style puzzle that’s closer to the BBC show than NYT’s version, as you only have three minutes to solve them.

There’s also Semantle, a game puzzle where you have to reach the secret word by guessing its meaning. Spelling doesn’t count in Semantle, as you have to pay attention to the numerical value your guesses have instead, to chart your path to the answer.

Lastly, if you’re interesting in how the NYTimes puzzles get made, we’ve got an interview with Jonathan Knight, Head of Games for The NYTimes

Good luck solving today’s Strands!