TechRadar publishes Sept. 16 answers for Quordle, Strands and Connections

TechRadar reported that Quordle game #1696 contains four different standard vowels, no repeated letters, and no Q, Z, X or J. None of the four answers starts with the same letter; the starting letters are S, P, B and F. In the Daily Sequence for game #1696, the answers are CRANK, GENIE, TORCH and REMIT. The writer said the mistake was guessing the words in the wrong order, and that he incorrectly guessed 'saver' on a hunch when more gettable quadrants remained, leaving him one guess to get the final word; he said he scraped through.

For NYT Strands game #927, the theme is 'Hard not to notice.' The six theme answers are JAZZY, VIVID, BRIGHT, FLASHY, STRIKING and VIBRANT, with the spangram EYECATCHING. The spangram has 11 letters and touches the top side in the first column and the bottom side in the fourth column. TechRadar listed clue words BRING, GIFT, HALF, STING, BIRTH and STIR. The writer rated the puzzle Hard and used one hint. He said he initially thought of obvious words such as conspicuous but there was no P on the board; two Zs helped him get JAZZY immediately, followed by VIVID and BRIGHT, but he needed a hint for FLASHY. He missed the spangram EYECATCHING, which he said was staring at him in his favorite starting position in the top left-hand corner.

For NYT Connections game #1193, TechRadar reported the yellow group ended in metal elements: LATIN, LONG JOHN SILVER, MARIGOLD and STEAM IRON. The green group started with U.S. coins: DIMENSION, NICKELODEON, PENNYWISE and QUARTERBACK. The blue group was poets' middle names: BARRETT, CARLOS, ST. VINCENT and WADSWORTH. The purple group was sausages plus a letter: BORAT, CLINK, FRANK-N-FURTER and WIDENER. The writer rated the puzzle Hard and recorded a Fail. He said it was the first Connections game he had lost in months and blamed a Tim Curry red herring, having tried three times to form a Tim Curry group because Curry played Dr. FRANK-N-FURTER in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and PENNYWISE in Stephen King's It, and later discovering that Curry played WADSWORTH in the film version of Clue. He then spotted STARTING WITH U.S. COINS, but with eight tiles left he connected four random tiles and accepted the loss.

TechRadar noted that each daily puzzle appears at midnight for a player's time zone, meaning some players are on 'today's' game while others are on 'yesterday's.' Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still running after more than 1,500 games, TechRadar said. Strands is an NYT word game following Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections, and can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile. Connections challenges players to group four items that share something in common, with green easy, yellow a little harder, blue often tough and purple usually very difficult, and it is free on the NYT Games site.