Kevin's Puzzles at Home Season 9: FINAL RESULTS!

FINAL SCORES

Here is a table of all of the participants and their scores (click to enlarge). Kudos to the 11 perfectionists (red) who scored 500 points and to the 6 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 9250. Thus, the final money pool for Palm Beach County Food Bank is $92.50. Three anonymous benefactors have agreed to match this donation, meaning that Palm Beach County Food Bank will actually receive $370.00. The total amount of money raised by Kevin's Puzzles at Home for various food banks now stands at $3,277.00.

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 10! (As of this writing, the illustrations are in progress, after which point the final testing will begin.) Also come back next Monday for the 2nd triannual Triple Crown Fox Derby contest sponsored by my Outside the Box Puzzles subscription service!

SEASON 9, EPISODE 1:
THIS ONE’S FOR THE DOGS!

The logic puzzle solves as follows:
Ed adopted Comet (clue 5), who isn’t the Chihuahua (clue 1). The Chihuahua also wasn’t adopted by Blake (clue 2), Cyndi (clue 1), or Daniel (clue 2); Amy’s dog is the Chihuahua. The Dalmatian wasn’t adopted by Blake (clue 4), Daniel (clue 1), or Ed (clue 5); Cyndi adopted the Dalmatian. Blake’s dog is not Ace (clue 4), Bear (clue 1), or Echo (clue 3); Blake’s dog is Dazzle. Ace does not belong to Amy (clue 1), nor is he Cyndi’s Dalmatian (clue 4); Daniel’s dog is Ace. Cyndi’s dog isn’t Echo (clue 3); Cyndi’s dog is Bear, and Amy’s dog is Echo. Ace is not the Affenpinscher (clue 1) or the Bulldog (clue 4); Ace is the Eurasier. Blake’s dog is not the Bulldog (clue 1); Blake’s dog is the Affenpinscher, and Ed’s dog is the Bulldog.

The spaces in the logic grid corresponding to the correct answer to the logic puzzle spell ANSWER SCHNAUZER.

 

Author's comments: I've started getting interested in story logic problems, and I wish I had an excuse to write some again (before this blog's MTV-style pivot from logic to words, it featured a few such puzzles involving the recurring character Eliza Pseudonym). Nikoli's ebook shop sells some PDF's of such puzzles, and while you need a translation to solve them if you can't read Japanese, they are an interesting peek into some ways of presenting these puzzles that aren't always common in the West. They've also trained me in using the logic grid as an abstract object without relying on the text.

SEASON 9, EPISODE 2:
SCINTILLATING SCI-FI

The missing words in the statements are ENCOUNTERS, PLAYER, BLADE, TERMINATOR, JURASSIC, APES, FUTURE, INDEPENDENCE, and SPOCK. The letters in the blanks marked by brackets spell the final answer CYBERPUNK.

 

Author's comments: A humorous comment from a solver: "You almost had me with your red herring questions and blanks and all of that, but I found the real puzzle by adding up the numerical values of each of the letters in the flavor text. They added up to 2077, obviously a clue to the *real* answer: CYBERPUNK. (Just kidding, I didn’t do any of that.)" By coincidence, Ryan Faley also published a puzzle with the answer CYBERPUNK a week before this puzzle came out; however, this puzzle was written months before Ryan's was available on Patreon.

SEASON 9, EPISODE 3:
HOPEFULLY NOT “SEW” MUCH HARDER

Each block of the quilt is divided into 8 lighter-colored sections surrounding one darker one; the light sections correspond to the possible positions for a flag in flag semaphore. When the two sections with diamonds in each block are interpreted as semaphore, they spell the final answer PATCHWORK.

 

Author's comments: Hopefully you know what semaphore is, or else guessed that "Sema IV" in the flavortext was a blatant hint.

SEASON 9, EPISODE 4:
WHY CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS?

The countries whose flags are depicted are CANADA, ITALY, JAPAN, BRAZIL, MEXICO, GERMANY, INDIA, CUBA, and TURKEY. Indexing into each country’s name by the number of American flags above its flag (for example, taking the 5th letter of CANADA because its flag has 5 American flags above it) spells the final answer DIPLOMACY.

 

Author's comments: One solver added that Diplomacy is "perhaps the most ironically-named board game of all time". Another said that it was a "nice touch that 'Y' can work with both TURKEY and TÜRKIYE"; this was unintentional, but if I had tried to extract the E from TURKEY and the alternative name were brought to my attention, I would probably have picked another country to make the puzzle cleaner.

SEASON 9, EPISODE 5:
MUSICAL LETTER CHAIRS

This is a standard laddergram puzzle, meaning that the words in column B are derived by anagramming the words in column A and removing a letter, and the words in column C are similarly derived from the words in column B. However, only the clues in column A are assigned to specific rows, meaning that the solver must figure out the corresponding rows for the other answers. The finished grid, with the removed letters written in the shaded spaces, is as follows:

The removed letters spell HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN DUO; the British pop duo who performed “Here Comes the Rain Again” is the final answer EURYTHMICS.

 

Author's comments: A few people submitted EURHYTHMICS, a valid alternate spelling of the word according to Merriam-Webster, but not of the name of the British new wave group. Music groups are always making their names hard to spell.

SEASON 9, EPISODE 6:
PERPLEXING PEARLS

The solution to the Masyu puzzle is shown here:

The letters not used by the loop spell NAME SHARED BY PAIZO RPG AND NISSAN SUV MODEL, a clue for the final answer PATHFINDER.

 

Author's comments: Some solvers commented that the Masyu was difficult; others apparently couldn't parse the string PAIZORPG in the clue, having existed very far away from the tabletop gaming hobby and therefore not knowing that Paizo is a noted publisher in that space.

SEASON 9, EPISODE 7:
LOVE CONNECTION

The solution to the Numberlink puzzle is shown here:

In the example puzzle, the letters along each path from the white heart to the gray heart, taken in numerical order by the path numbers, spell ONLY READ EVERY FIFTH LETTER IN THE REAL PUZZLE; when the same is done in the real puzzle, every fifth letter spells out “LOVE BLANK” FROM JUSTIN BIEBER’S ALBUM “PURPOSE”, a clue for the final answer YOURSELF.

 

Author's comments: Numberlink can be a scary puzzle if you're used to having to solve everything logically step by step, but if you allow yourself to be guided by intuition, and you may find yourself enjoying this puzzle genre as much as I now do. Craving more Numberlink? These two Nikoli books should satisfy you!

SEASON 9, EPISODE 8:
AND BINGO WASN’T HIS GAME-O

The flavortext mentions Kevin being one space away from a win in seven games of bingo. Each of the seven previous answers can be matched with one of the seven bingo cards such that, when the letters in the answer are marked on the card, the card is one space away from having a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line of five marked spaces:

The letters that are missing in these winning lines spell OTHELLO, the game that Kevin should play if he wants to turn things (specifically black-and-white discs) around.

Author's comments: Once again, I challenged myself to write a meta which doesn't ultimately boil down to extracting letters from the answers. In fact, by its very nature, this meta does quite the opposite, extracting letters not found in the answers. This meta puzzle allowed quite a lot of flexibility regarding the feeder answers, too, which was useful.