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ForbesNYT “Strands” Tips, Spangram and Answers for Monday, December 16thFrom Paul Tassi

After yesterday’s hardest Strands puzzle ever with made-up words, I can promise you that this one will be a little easier.

How to play Strands

The New York Times’ strands Puzzle is a classic word search game. It’s currently in beta, meaning it won’t last unless enough people play it every day.

There’s a new game strands to play every day. 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.

Each letter is used once in one of the topic words and in the Spangram. You can connect letters vertically, horizontally and diagonally and change direction in the middle of a word. If you’re playing on a touchscreen, double-tap the last letter to place your guess.

Finding three valid off-topic words with at least four letters will unlock the Hint button. Clicking on it will highlight the letters that make up one of the topic words.

Be warned: you must be on your guard. Sometimes you need to fill in the missing words in a phrase. Other days the game might revolve around synonyms or homophones. The difficulty varies from day to day and the puzzle creators will sometimes try to surprise you.

What is today’s Strands clue?

The official notice comes first and then I’ll make one up to move things along.

It’s lit!

And my note is:

Reading Rainbow

What are today’s Strands answers?

First comes the Spangram and below that is the answer list.

fiction genre

And here you will find this on the board:

Here are all the answers:

ROMANCE

CRIME

WESTERN

HISTORICAL

FANTASY

Well, I searched for science fiction, my favorite genre, but it didn’t make it. I didn’t know that Western fiction was its own subgenre, but I guess that makes perfect sense. I was confused because I thought fiction was the Spangram when it went from one page to the other, but they wanted us to focus on the genre again, I guess.

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