Kevin's Puzzles at Home Season 7: FINAL RESULTS!

FINAL SCORES

Here is a table of all of the participants and their scores (click to enlarge). Kudos to the 12 perfectionists (red) who scored 500 points and to the 3 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 8400. Thus, the final money pool for the Food Bank of West Central Texas is $84.00. Three anonymous benefactors have agreed to match this donation, meaning that the Food Bank of West Central Texas will actually receive $336.00. The total amount of money raised by Kevin's Puzzles at Home for various food banks now stands at $2,613.00.

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 September when I plan to launch Season 8!

SEASON 7, EPISODE 1:
FIVE EASY PIECES

There is exactly one way to assemble the given shape with the five tetromino-shaped pieces:

From top to bottom, the letters seen through the holes in the pieces spell the final answer LABOR.

 

Author's note: My puzzles at home! Issue #5 of Fox & Badger Magazine contained a puzzle with this exact same mechanic of assembling a grid from the 5 tetrominoes and reading letters through the holes. The biggest difference is that there are 5 grids, and not 5, and the 25 letters spell a clue phrase. The concept was born from a thought experiment about what type of puzzles I'd design for an escape room. Something like this which is simple enough to be approached by anyone, while rewarding the type of thinking that is used in more logical puzzles, seems to be the sweet spot for me in that context. Also, my sincerest apologies to my international readers for misspelling the word "labour".

 

SEASON 7, EPISODE 2:
METEOROLOGICAL MYSTERY

The temperatures in the forecast are all below 26, and so one can index into the alphabet using those numbers; the 6th, 1st, 8th, 18th, 5th, 14th, 8th, 5th, 9th, and 20th letters of the alphabet spell the final answer FAHRENHEIT.

 

Author's note: I'm 2 for 2 for answers that alienate my international readers! My apologies to all of you who use the Celsius temperature scale, which is based on the freezing and boiling points of water, rather than America's far more sensible scale based on the freezing point of a particular brine solution and a rough estimate of human body temperature.

SEASON 7, EPISODE 3:
APP-Y DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

The six apps on Kevin’s phone are YOUTUBE, DISCORD, FACEBOOK, SNAPCHAT, DROPBOX, and LINKEDIN. Indexing into each app’s name by the number of notifications shown (for example, taking the 4th letter of YOUTUBE because it has 4 notifications) spells the final answer TIKTOK.

 

Author's note: I suppose you could consider this puzzle the "we have X at home" version of the real Kevin's A Familiar Design, in that both puzzles will make reverse image search your best friend if you don't recognize the logos in question. But this presentation is probably more thematically cohesive, since they're all smartphone apps and not random logos. Also, I think that the age demographic of people who would recognize these logos skews younger than with A Familiar Design, if only because the brands in the latter have, for the most part, been around for much longer.

 

SEASON 7, EPISODE 4:
TEXAS FEVER

The names of the Texas cities, which are helpfully described in alphabetical order (ARLINGTON, CORPUS CHRISTI, FORT WORTH, HOUSTON, ODESSA, SAN ANTONIO, VICTORIA, and WACO), can be written across the grid as follows:

Reading down one of the columns spells the final answer DOWNTOWN.
 

Author's note: Shoutout to the solver who apparently thought that the University of Texas of the Permian Basin Stonehenge is in INGRAM, got NOWN TOWN, and tried to figure out which Texas town something called "nown" is located in.

 

SEASON 7, EPISODE 5:
PICTURE THIS

This is a standard spelling-based rebus:
SWORD-S=WORD
BEE-E+FOREST-ST=BEFORE
E+CLIPS+E=ECLIPSE
OAR-A=OR
PAN+EEL-E=PANEL
WORD BEFORE ECLIPSE OR PANEL is a clue for the final answer SOLAR.

 

Author's note: The real Kevin has used rebuses several times, so the fact that I waited so many seasons to mimic this might be surprising. One solver found the "Reba's rebus" in the flavor illustration humorous. I have nothing else to say about this puzzle, I guess.

 

SEASON 7, EPISODE 6:
YET ANOTHER BASEBALL BAFFLER

One can reconstruct the results of the baseball game logically as follows:
* By clue 7, the hits at the top and the bottom of the 4th were triples.
* By clue 2, the hits at the bottom of the 2nd and the top of the 6th were home runs. One of these home runs was one full inning after Ezra hit a triple; this can’t have been the hit at the top of the 6th, as Ezra’s triple would have been at the top of the 5th, contradicting clue 7. Thus, it was the one at the bottom of the 2nd, with Ezra’s triple at the bottom of the 1st. By clue 2, the other home run at the bottom of the 6th was one half-inning after Theo’s single at the bottom of the 5th.
* By clue 7, the hit at the top of the 5th can’t be a single, and the triples and home runs are all accounted for, so it was a double.
* By clue 6, Wolf Lief and Fox Raul hit in the same inning, and Lief got more bases than Raul; this could only have happened if Leif hit a double at the top of the 3rd and Raul hit a single at the bottom of the 3rd.
* By clue 3, a Wolf hit a single and Fox Drew got a hit in the same inning; this could only have happened if the Wolf’s single was at the top of the 2nd and Drew hit at the bottom of the 2nd. By elimination, the hit at the top of the 1st was a double.
* By clue 4, Liam hit one full inning before teammate Gary did and did so for fewer bases than Gary; this could only have happened if Liam hit at the top of the 5th and Gary hit at the top of the 6th.
* By clue 1, Abel hit during an odd-numbered inning; this could only have happened if Abel hit at the top of the 1st.
* By clue 5, Nash hit sometime before Huck and sometime after Eric; this could only have happened if Nash hit at the top of the 4th, Huck hit at the bottom of the 4th, and Eric hit at the top of the 2nd.

Indexing into the players’ names by the numbers of bases they hit for spells BREWERS CITY, a clue for the final answer MILWAUKEE.

 

Author's note: Would you believe that this Baseball Baffler was written before the other two? Due to a miscalculation, I thought that Season 5 would have 8 Mondays instead of 9, and wrote this 8-puzzle season for it. Once I realized my mistake about a week before everything was set to launch, I renumbered Season 6, which I had already written, to be Season 5, made the old Season 5 the new Season 7, and hastily wrote a brand new Season 6 to fill in the gap. This ended up working well for this trilogy, as the progression from Morse code to a simple story logic puzzle to this somewhat (much?) harder story logic puzzle seems very nice.

 

SEASON 7, EPISODE 7:
I’VE “ADD” IT UP TO HERE!

The solution to the Kakuro puzzle is shown here:

When the numbers in the pink and cyan rows are transferred to the bottom, they become coordinates for the grid of letters (for example, the letter in row 9, column 6 of the letter grid is R). The letters thus obtained spell the final answer REMAINDER.

 

Author's note: This Kakuro puzzle ended up rather harder than I would have liked, and it seemed that many solvers agreed. One solver commented, "I gotta say, this was one of the better cross sums puzzles I have seen in a while. Great insights for crossings that could or couldn't contain certain numbers. A joy to solve!" I probably could have stood to make it much, much harder, though, judging by the number of solves the KenKen/TomTom got last time.

 

SEASON 7, EPISODE 8:
A MUSICAL META

The reference to “a deer (a female deer)” hints at the song “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, suggesting that this puzzle revolves around solfege (the familiar “do re mi fa so la ti do” scale). The sheet music depicts a simple ascending scale from one “do” to the next higher “do”, with each measure of the music containing a varying number of repeats of the corresponding note. The solver should observe that the previous answers all begin with DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, and TI, meaning that one can pair each of the notes with one of the answers:
DO (5 times): DOWNTOWN
RE (4 times): REMAINDER
MI (7 times): MILWAUKEE
FA (5 times): FAHRENHEIT
SO (4 times): SOLAR
LA (3 times): LABOR
TI (5 times): TIKTOK
DO (7 times): DOWNTOWN
Indexing into each answer by the number of repeats of that note (for example, taking the 5th letter of DOWNTOWN because the first measure of the music has 5 repeats of the note “do”) spells what Kevin (and you!) should do next, TAKE A BOW.

Author's note: I was contemplating the idea of using answers with two musical notes in them for a meta in my now defunct Fox & Badger Magazine; this evolved into the vastly simplified idea I used here. I had to completely rewrite the puzzle for the answer starting with SO since certain pedants believe that the fifth note on the major scale is actually "sol", not "so". I am more familiar with "so", and making one of the notes three letters for no reason is just a horrible idea, but since it is possible to appease the pedants without ruining the puzzle for anyone else, I did so. I do rather like a meta that reveals a hidden commonality in the feeder answers, something that was staring you in the face the whole time and you might not have noticed. Even so, I must admit that I was a bit surprised by some of the positive feedback this otherwise completely standard and uninventive puzzle got from solvers (“ingenious last puzzle” and “a very clever and satisfying conclusion”). Mechanically, this is the exact same as the real Kevin's Fortnight of Festivities, but with a music score and DO RE MI FA SO LA TI instead of a calendar and SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT. I guess that shows the power of an interesting presentation that makes discovering those completely standard solving steps fun.