Kevin's Puzzles at Home Season 6: FINAL RESULTS!

FINAL SCORES

Here is a table of all of the participants and their scores (click to enlarge). Kudos to the 13 perfectionists (red) who scored 500 points and to the 5 completionists (orange) who solved every puzzle!

Participants are sorted by score (high to low), and then alphabetically (A to Z). The total number of points scored is 10350. Thus, the final money pool for the Palm Beach County Food Bank is $103.50. Four anonymous benefactors (including one who stepped forward during the last week) have agreed to match this donation, meaning that the Palm Beach County Food Bank will actually receive $517.50. The total amount of money raised by Kevin's Puzzles at Home for various food banks now stands at $2,277.00.

Head below the break for the actual solutions! If you're looking for more easy-ish puzzles in this style, remember to visit the actual Kevin's website every single Monday, or come back to this site in May when I plan to launch Season 7!

SEASON 6, EPISODE 1:
A HIGH-TEC PUZZLE

The missing words in the statements are (W)OLFE, ENCYCLOPED(I)A, S(T)EELE, MO(N)K, HOLM(E)S, MAR(S), and (S)PADE. The letters in the blanks marked by parentheses spell the final answer WITNESS.

 

Author's note: An early draft had Auguste DUPIN instead of ENCYCLOPEDIA Brown; the latter proved to be slightly more friendly to clue, and this being the first episode of a new season, friendly clues are great.

SEASON 6, EPISODE 2:
HOPEFULLY NOT “SEW” HARD

When the light diamond-shaped blocks of the quilt are interpreted as Braille, they spell the final answer BATIK.

Author's note: My late mother was in a quilter's guild, so I was very familiar with the word BATIK, albeit not its precise meaning, as a youngster; some solvers were tripped up by having never seen the word before.

SEASON 6, EPISODE 3:
COLOR MY WORLD

The 15 colors hidden in the word search are AMARANTH, AMBER, APRICOT, CARMINE, CERISE, CHAMPAGNE, CHARTREUSE, COPPER, CREAM, FUCHSIA, MAGENTA, PLATINUM, SALMON, SEPIA, and TAUPE:

The unused letters spell ANSWER SPECTRUM.

 

Author's note: One poor solver seemed bent on overthinking the "ANSWER SPECTRUM" prompt and was treating ANSWER as a blank to be filled in, submitting all sorts of incorrect answers like "visible". 

SEASON 6, EPISODE 4:
ANOTHER BASEBALL BAFFLER

The logic puzzle solves as follows:
The Elephants were the visiting team on January 15 (clue 3). Their opponents were not themselves (intro), the Cougars (clue 3), the Aardvarks (clue 5), or the Deer (clue 5); they were the Badgers. The home team on January 8 wasn’t the Cougars (clue 4), the Elephants (clue 4), or the Deer (clue 5); it was the Aardvarks, and the Deer were the home team on January 29 (clue 5). The home team on January 1 wasn’t the Elephants (clue 1); it was the Cougars, who were also the visiting team on January 29 (clue 1). By elimination, the Elephants were the home team on January 22. The Aardvarks’ visiting opponents on January 8 weren’t the Aardvarks (intro) or the Deer (clue 4); they were the Badgers. The visiting team on January 22 wasn’t the Aardvarks (clue 2); it was the Deer. By elimination, the Aardvarks were the visiting team on January 1.

The spaces in the logic grid corresponding to the correct answer to the logic puzzle spell HALL OF FAMER RYAN, a clue for the final answer NOLAN.

 Author's note: More than one solver tried to just submit HALL OF FAME, as though the letters in the bottom 5x5 box have no purpose.

SEASON 6, EPISODE 5:
CONFUSING COLUMNS

When the letters are put in the columns in the right order, they spell “TO FINISH THIS POEM WILL NOT TAKE MUCH TIME. WHEN WORDS END WITH MATCHING SOUNDS, THAT IS A BLANK.”:

The word that completes the poem is the final answer RHYME.

Author's note: This one was pretty easy to solve. Amazingly, my very first draft of the clue phrase parsed in such a way that no words span across two lines, a detail that you'd think would take a lot of finagling.

SEASON 6, EPISODE 6:
ARCANE ARCHIPELAGO

The unique solution to the Norinori puzzle is shown below:

The example puzzle demonstrates the answer extraction mechanism: the solver must add up the column numbers of the shaded cells in each row which occupy numbered columns, and shift the letter in that row forward by that many positions in the alphabet (wrapping from Z to A as necessary). For example, in the top row, there are shaded cells in columns 3 and 6, which add up to 9, and the letter K shifted forward 9 positions in the alphabet is T. The resulting letters spell THE ALOHA STATE, a clue to the final answer HAWAII.

Author's note: This puzzle was an enormous difficulty spike, and I'm not sure why. Norinori puzzles are generally among the easiest puzzles that Nikoli offers (to the point that, back when this blog was devoted to logic puzzles, before it made its MTV-style pivot to word puzzles, I called them "Dominnocuous"). I think extraction proved to be difficult for some folks to reverse engineer from the example. Also, at least one solver tried to submit the clue THE ALOHA STATE as the answer.

 

SEASON 6, EPISODE 7:
WORK YOUR MAGIC

This is a puzzle often known as an Anagram Magic Square. The answer to each clue is an anagram of one of the words given in the square; as a solving aid, the corresponding clue numbers in each row and column add up to 65. The answers are:
1. INDEX, 2. TABLE, 3. ALERT, 4. LABOR, 5. IDEAL, 6. ALIEN, 7. NOTES, 8. GEODE, 9. RANGE, 10. EARLY, 11. ELBOW, 12. TORTE, 13. INGOT, 14. NAMES, 15. GLEAN, 16. OSCAR, 17. REBUS, 18. FIERY, 19. ANVIL, 20. RAVEL, 21. EAGER, 22. WROTE, 23. EGRET, 24. LEAPT, 25. LANCE.

The initial letters of the clue answers, in clue order, spell ITALIAN GREETING OR FAREWELL, a clue for the final answer CIAO.

Author's note: Penny Press veterans will instantly recognize this as an Anagram Magic Square. As a youngster, I loved the combination of math and wordplay; as an adult, the magic square element seems tacked on and unnecessary once you've mastered the anagram part. At least one solver was completely tripped up by answer extraction, which is not hinted at aside from being the exact same as in the popular-ish puzzle it's based on. When in doubt, read the initials of things.

 

SEASON 6, EPISODE 8:
“KEN” YOU SOLVE THIS?

The unique solution to the KenKen/TomTom puzzle is shown below:

Some of the cages have question marks instead of numerical values; when their numerical values are calculated and indexed into the alphabet (1=A, 2=B, 3=C. . .), they spell the final answer ALGEBRA.

Author's note: The first two puzzles I ever had published on Grandmaster Puzzles were two cute little TomToms with my first and last name hidden in them. I anticipated this puzzle being the hardest of the set, and was clearly wrong; perhaps I should have redacted the operations and had larger cages to really make y'all work for your points.

 

SEASON 6, EPISODE 9:
LINE ’EM UP

The solver must figure out where to write the answers in their corresponding rows so that two words are formed in the indicated columns. There is one way to do this:

The central columns spell what it takes to solve these puzzles, the final answer CRITICAL THINKING.

Author's note: Cohort Ryan Faley invented this puzzle, loosely basing it on and naming it after a pricing game from The Price is Right (hence the reference to the show in this puzzle's illustration). Having solved a bunch of these on Ryan's blog, I thought it would be a fun tribute to turn it into a meta for Kevin's Puzzles at Home. One solver did call it "solid", and I like to hope that a few of the other solvers would agree, but in the "you can't please everyone" department, another solver said "it wasn't a satisfying solve", and only seemed more disappointed that this lame puzzle idea wasn't even mine. So if you hated this puzzle, don't visit Ryan's blog!