Strands is back Thursday with a new topic and Spangram, and we can help with the Strand’s answers for today, May 23.
If you’re new to Strands, your goal in this special New York Times daily puzzle is to find all of the theme words and a “spangram” in a word search-like grid. All of the regular words relate to that spangram, a word or phrase that you must also find in the word search puzzle.
To help you narrow down the topic and guess the related words, there is a topic sentence. Using this clue, you then have to find all the correct words that relate to it. The only catch is that your letters have to be next to each other. This makes it easier to find words than a regular word search puzzle because you can go in any direction. However, this also makes it harder to find the exact topic words because there are so many options.
Luckily, there is a hint system. For every word you submit that isn’t a theme word or spangram, you progress toward unlocking a hint. Once you’ve unlocked one, you can 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 beta, so some of these rules may change in the future after the full release.
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Notes on today’s Strands response
Instead of going straight to the answers, you may just need a few hints to get all the topic words and the spangram, so here are some Notes for today’s strands:
- Today’s topic “No Dice!” refers to board games that are played without dice.
- The spangram begins on the fifth line, ends on the last line, is 10 letters long and spans two words.
- In total, there is one five-letter, one seven-letter, one eight-letter and two nine-letter theme words.
- One of the nine-letter words begins with “C” and is the name for someone who is famous.
- The other nine-letter word starts with “T” and is something you can use for long-distance conversations.
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Strands answers for May 22
Here are the Strands answers for today:
- MAFIA
- TWISTER
- charade
- CELEBRITY
- PHONE
Today’s Strands Spangram is called “PARTY GAMES.”
Aside from “CELEBRITY,” I didn’t find the strands too difficult today, but admittedly I did have to use hints to get to the finish faster. Hopefully the hints above helped you solve today’s strands quickly too!
What to play after Strands?
You may have heard of this game called Wordle? It’s pretty good, we think it’s here to stay. If you’ve already solved that today, however, the New York Times offers other games. As for word-based games, there’s Connections, the Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee, and Letter Boxed. If you need a break from words, 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 are a few rule differences, but basically it’s just a never-ending stream of Strands puzzles to solve.
However, if you’re looking for something similar to Connections, in the UK you should fire up the BBC iPlayer and play along to “Only Connect,” which came out many years before the daily NYT Connections puzzle, as presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell was quick to point out.
Puzzgrid is another Connections-style puzzle that’s closer to the BBC show than the NYT version, as you only have three minutes to solve it.
There’s also Semantle, a game puzzle where you have to find the secret word by guessing its meaning. Spelling doesn’t count in Semantle, as you instead have to pay attention to the numerical value of your guesses to find your way to the answer.
And if you want to know how the NYTimes puzzles are created, we have an interview with Jonathan Knight, the head of the NYTimes games department.
Good luck solving today’s strands!