Looking for Friday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:

Sometimes a topic is so broad that it’s almost harder than it would be otherwise, given how many potential answers there might be. That’s the case with today’s puzzle.

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:

May the forest be with you

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.

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:

Here it is on the page, and read on:

  • DOGWOOD
  • APSEN
  • CEDAR
  • BIRCH
  • EUCALYPTUS
  • CYPRESS

So, pretty quick you will realize that the tree-based takeover of May the Fourth Be With You (A Star Wars thing, for the uninitiated) is about trees, there are so many trees out there that picking just six of them as answers here are tough. I was looking for the likes of maple, redwood, cherry and others, but they did not make the cut. The very hard to spell eucalyptus did, however, and cypress also through me for a good long while as well.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .