Quordle, Connections and Strands Answers Published for Tuesday, September 15

For Quordle, the four answers in game #1695 are SHUSH, LITHE, DELTA and BUGLE. TechRadar's hints noted that the puzzle contains four different standard vowels, that one answer contains a repeated letter, and that the letters Q, Z, X and J appear in none of the four words. No two answers begin with the same letter; the opening letters are S, L, D and B. The writer said the game went smoothly, although he came close to entering "bulge" instead of BUGLE. The answers to Tuesday's Quordle Daily Sequence, game #1695, are GULLY, CUMIN, BARON and BASIS.

NYT Connections game #1192 asked players to sort sixteen words — plant, coach, whistle, dessert, handle, caboose, December, sleeper, direct, train, lid, asset, spout, mole, epilogue and guide — into four groups of four. The groups are INSTRUCT, made up of coach, direct, guide and train; PARTS OF A WHISTLING KETTLE, made up of handle, lid, spout and whistle; UNDERCOVER OPERATIVE, made up of asset, mole, plant and sleeper; and THINGS THAT APPEAR AT THE END, made up of caboose, December, dessert and epilogue. TechRadar's writer rated the puzzle hard and finished with two mistakes, having first put lid and handle into the final group instead of December. He said the result was his 54th "purple first," meaning the hardest group was completed before the others.

Strands game #926 carried the theme "If you build it," with a spangram of eight letters that touches the left and right sides of the board on the fifth row. The theme words are joist, bolt, hinge, nail, knob, bracket, anchor and screw, and the spangram is HARDWARE. TechRadar rated the puzzle easy; its writer reported a perfect score and said he found the first two words, JOIST and BOLT, without looking. He also noted that several words outside the answer set, including HINT, were easy to spot in the grid.

Strands is the New York Times' word game released after Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections, and it can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile. Connections asks players to find four groups of four items that share something in common, with each group given a different difficulty level, and allows up to four mistakes. The same pages also pointed readers to the previous day's puzzles: Quordle #1694, answered ZEBRA, LEGAL, RATIO and TROLL; Connections #1191, whose groups covered waterbirds, informants, common single-use plastic items and words that precede "grass"; and Strands #925, whose spangram was THATSSHOCKING.