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ForbesNYT “Strands” Tips and Answers for Friday, November 1 (#243)From Kris Holt

Time for a fresh start to the weekend, even if you don’t put off work to do so.

How to play Strands

The New York Times Strands puzzle is a nod to the classic word search. It’s currently in beta, meaning it won’t last unless enough people play it every day.

Every day there is a new game of Strands to play. The game presents you with a letter grid of six by eight letters. The goal is to find a group of words that have something in common and give you a clue as to what the topic is. When you find a topic word, it remains highlighted in blue.

You also need to find a special word called Spangram. This will tell you what the words have in common. The spangram connects two opposite sides of the board. While the topic words are not a proper noun, the spangram can be a proper noun. When you find the Spangram, it will remain highlighted in yellow.

Be warned: you must be on your guard.

“Some topics are fill-in-the-blank texts. They can also be steps in a process, elements that all belong to the same category, synonyms, or homophones,” notes the New York Times. “Just as she varies the difficulty of Wordle puzzles over the course of a week, (Wordle and Strands editor Tracy), Bennett plans to throw curveballs to Strands solvers from time to time.”

What is today’s Strands clue?

We’ll follow the NYT advice and then my own advice to take you further after that:

Good on paper

And mine is:

Back to school

What are today’s Strands answers?

Now we start with the response part of the program, the Spangram, and the complete list, the Spangram, is:

OFFICE ACCESSORIES

Here’s where that is:

Here are the rest of the answers:

RULER

SCISSORS

STAPLER

PRINTER

PENCILS

I’m not going to lie, I found this pretty hard. I guess technically it all has to do with paper, but at first I thought it was like marking on paper and PRINTER didn’t come to mind. And the Spangram? OFFICESupply’s snaking around like a paperclip is actually very funny, if difficult to find (I actually searched for “paperclip” to find a word, but it didn’t). How have you been?

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