Work through the levels. Reveal the Spangram only when you’re truly ready.
Today’s clue: “🦆🦆 ... 🪿”
A gentle direction — no specifics.
Closer — the category is coming into focus.
Near-direct — only read if you’re stuck.
Direction only.
Getting closer.
Near-direct.
6 theme words — lengths in random order
Spaces not counted in total
All theme words — shuffled
These words fit the theme on the surface, but aren’t part of today’s solution. Knowing them ahead of time can save you minutes of searching.
The bird emojis make a noisy animal word feel like an obvious hidden answer.
Bird imagery in the clue pulls the eye toward habitat words, so NEST looks more promising than it is.
It sounds like the kind of animal-motion word the clue's emojis are inviting.
a textbook decoy
The 3.8 feels right because the emoji clue practically hands over DUCKDUCKGOOSE, and once that ritual is named, CHASE, CIRCLE, GAME, PLAYGROUND, SELECT, and WALK all snap into place as its actions and staging. Finding CIRCLE and PLAYGROUND first is the real unlock: they pin the grid to a schoolyard scene, after which CHASE and WALK become obvious verbs to scan for and GAME feels like the label holding the set together. SELECT is the last holdout because it describes the choosing tap rather than the running, and the spangram is easy to spot given the clue but still has to snake across the board to touch opposite sides. What makes the set harder to group than it first appears is the mix of verbs, nouns, and one abstract label, so the solver keeps switching between imagining the ritual and hunting for plain words.
The clue is almost a rebus: two duck emojis, an ellipsis, and a goose emoji. That ellipsis is doing the work of the missing repeated call, so the clue is literally spelling out the rhythm of DUCKDUCKGOOSE without writing the words. It hints that the puzzle will be about the playground ritual itself, not birds in general, and that ellipsis also nudges you to think about the pause before the final word. Once you make that connection, the rest of the theme words read as the game's choreography.
Tracy Bennett's set avoids naming the ritual's participants and instead circles its mechanics: the ring of players, the choosing moment, the pursuit, and the schoolyard where it happens. That choice makes the puzzle feel like stage directions rather than a vocabulary list. GAME is the only abstract label; CHASE, SELECT, and WALK supply verbs while CIRCLE and PLAYGROUND supply the physical stage. DUCKDUCKGOOSE names the ritual those pieces assemble.
