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ForbesNYT “Strands” Tips, Spangram and Answers for Thursday, October 17thFrom Paul Tassi

Time for a new Strands puzzle, and this is the hardest one I've done in a long time, and it even required a little cheating to get all the answers, which I hate.

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 the Wordle puzzles within a week, (Wordle and Strands editor Tracy), Bennett plans to throw curveballs to the Strands solvers from time to time.”

What is today's Strands clue?

First the NYT note, then comes mine:

Everything packed up

And mine is:

Hidden delicacy

You will soon find out what that means.

What are today's Strands answers?

In the answer portion of today's program, we'll start with the Spangram and then create the full answer list. The spangram is:

dumplings

And this is what it says on the board:

The remaining answers are:

• RAVLIOLI
• PIEROGI
• EMPANADA
• SAMOSA
• WONTON
• GYOZA

Gosh, yeah, okay. That was difficult. At first I thought it was some kind of packaged food, but then I realized from the spangram that it was just DUMPLINGS, which made things much more difficult. I guess I didn't realize that a pasta dish like RAVIOLI was technically a dumpling, although I guess that makes sense. I couldn't spell PIEROGI for the life of me, and for some reason it took me forever to figure out EMPANADA. The other three came to mind relatively easily as the first thing that came to mind was something like GYOZA or WONTON. I usually drink SAMOSAs.

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