Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

NYT Strands today: hints, spangram and answers for Tuesday, September 30

Add as a preferred source on Google

Strands is yet another daily puzzle from the New York Times that you can add to your routine to flex your brain muscles. A trickier take on the classic word search, you’ll need a keen eye to solve this puzzle.

Like Wordle, Connections, and the Mini Crossword, Strands can be a bit difficult to solve some days. There’s no shame in needing a little help from time to time. If you’re stuck and need to know the answers to today’s Strands puzzle, check out the solved puzzle below.

How to play Strands

You start every Strands puzzle with the goal of finding the “theme words” hidden in the grid of letters. Manipulate letters by dragging or tapping to craft words; double-tap the final letter to confirm. If you find the correct word, the letters will be highlighted blue and will no longer be selectable.

If you find a word that isn’t a theme word, it still helps! For every three non-theme words you find that are at least four letters long, you’ll get a hint — the letters of one of the theme words will be revealed and you’ll just have to unscramble it.

Every single letter on the grid is used to spell out the theme words and there is no overlap. Every letter will be used once, and only once.

Each puzzle contains one “spangram,” a special theme word (or words) that describes the puzzle’s theme and touches two opposite sides of the board. When you find the spangram, it will be highlighted yellow.

The goal should be to complete the puzzle quickly without using too many hints.

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s theme is “For goodness’ sake.”

Here’s a hint that might help you: positive traits

Today’s Strand answers

Today’s spanagram

We’ll start by giving you the spangram, which might help you figure out the theme and solve the rest of the puzzle on your own:

  • VALUES

Today’s Strands answers

  • DISCIPLINE
  • HONESTY
  • COOPERATION
  • EMPATHY
  • RESPECT
Jesse Lennox
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jesse Lennox covers all things gaming but has a specific interest in all things PlayStation, JRPGs, and experimental indies…
Sony is helping bury physical games, and preservation is being left to clean up the mess
A reported 2028 cutoff for PS5 discs gives the industry a deadline it still doesn’t seem ready to handle.
A PS5 sitting on its side with two Dualsense controllers next to it on the right.

Sony’s reported plan to stop producing PS5 discs in 2028 would push PlayStation deeper into a digital-first future, where access depends on licenses, storefront policy, and platform support lasting longer than companies usually promise.

That’s tidy for Sony and ugly for game preservation. Physical media was never a perfect archive, but removing it before a serious replacement exists turns the survival of old games into someone else’s emergency. It also raises questions about long-term ownership, resale rights, and whether players can truly rely on purchases to remain accessible decades later.

Read more
PS Plus adds Modern Warfare III in July, plus two games worth your time
The unremarkable Call of Duty campaign comes bundled with remastered multiplayer maps, joined by For the King II and CrossCode.
PlayStation Plus July 2026 games featured

PlayStation Plus subscribers are getting a new lineup to dig into starting July 7, and this one leads with the biggest name Sony has put in the Monthly Games slot in a while. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III headlines this month's lineup, joined by the co-op fantasy RPG For the King II and the retro-style action RPG CrossCode. All three games will be available on PS5 and PS4 and remain available through August 3.

A blockbuster with a rocky reputation

Read more
Cinder City wants 64GB of RAM, and the rest of its PC specs make it even weirder
Remember when 16GB RAM was enough?
Cinder City Gameplay screenshot

For years, PC gamers have joked that game developers treat hardware requirements like a shopping list. Cinder City might have just taken that joke a little too seriously. The game's newly listed recommended PC specs ask for a whopping 64GB of RAM. That's a figure that's raising eyebrows because almost everything else on the list looks surprisingly… normal.

64GB RAM paired with an RTX 4060?

Read more