Quordle, Strands and Connections Puzzles for Saturday, September 26 Released

The games were numbered Quordle #1706, Strands #937 and Connections #1203 for the day. TechRadar's writers rated both the Strands and Connections puzzles as easy and reported solving them with perfect scores, while the Quordle columnist said a wrong guess of "false" used up one of the mistakes the game allows.

For Connections, the sixteen starting words were MINT, PRESS, GRAIN, BEANS, STARCH, CAT, CUCUMBER, RINGS, GUM, FOLD, KNOTS, CUSTOMER, WASH, MOUTHWASH, BURL and SPRAY. The yellow group, breath fresheners, was GUM, MINT, MOUTHWASH and SPRAY. The green group, things done to a dress shirt at the laundry, was FOLD, PRESS, STARCH and WASH. The blue group, features of wood, was BURL, GRAIN, KNOTS and RINGS. The purple group, "cool" things in expressions, was BEANS, CAT, CUCUMBER and CUSTOMER.

Strands carried the theme "A breath of fresh air". The words to be found were BREEZE, ZEPHYR, GUST, WHIFF, PUFF, FLURRY and CURRENT, alongside a ten-letter spangram, GENTLEWIND, which ran from the first column at the top of the board to the sixth column at the bottom. TechRadar listed CURE, FEEL, PREY, BREW, DICE and SWIFT as clue words that unlock the in-game hint system.

Quordle's four answers were SNORT, BIBLE, LAPSE and CRANE. The puzzle used four different standard vowels, contained none of the letters Q, Z, X or J, and no two answers began with the same letter; the opening letters were S, B, L and C. The separate Daily Sequence version of the game, also numbered 1706, was solved by GLEAM, GOUGE, DWELL and ROGUE.

Quordle, one of the earliest alternatives to Wordle, has now passed 1,500 daily games. Strands followed Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections into the New York Times games stable and has been running for about a year. Strands and Connections are playable free through the NYT Games site on desktop and mobile; Connections asks players to sort sixteen words into four groups of four, rates green as the easiest category and purple as the hardest, and permits up to four mistakes.

On Friday, September 25, Quordle #1705 was solved by SWEAR, FLOOD, GUPPY and GROAN, while Strands #936 had the spangram SQUARENUMBER with the answers NINE, TWENTYFIVE, FOUR, EIGHTYONE and THIRTYSIX. Connections #1202 grouped BOUGIE, FANCY, POSH and SWANK as luxe, ESCAPEMENT, PENDULUM, RATCHET and SPRING as parts of a mechanical clock, AYKROYD, LEVY, RATHER and SAVAGE as famous Dans, and BORDER, CLASSY, FOAMILY and GENIUS as taxonomic ranks plus a letter.