Kevin's Puzzles at Home Season 2: FINAL RESULTS!

FINAL SCORES

Here is a table of all of the participants and their scores (click to enlarge):

Participants are sorted by score (high to low), and then alphabetically (A to Z). The total number of points scored was 8325. Thus, the final money pool for the Food Bank for Larimer County is $83.25. Three anonymous benefactors have agreed to match this donation, meaning that the Food Bank for Larimer County will actually receive $333.00.

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 2023 when I hope to have Season 3 of this tribute series ready!

SEASON 2, EPISODE 1:
PHOTOGRAPHIC MAMMAL-RY

The names of the animals, which are helpfully depicted in alphabetical order (BADGER, CAMEL, DOLPHIN, HIPPOPOTAMUS, KANGAROO, LION, and PORCUPINE), can be written across the grid as follows:

Reading down one of the columns spells the final answer, POLECAT.

Author's note: The "write things of different lengths across the staggered rows and the answer reads vertically" format has been used multiple times by the real Kevin, and once before by me in what has been retroactively termed Season 1 of Kevin's Puzzles at Home. Reusing such a format can almost feel lazy, but it's also not a bad idea from a didactic standpoint if you want to train solvers on specific concepts which one must master to break into the instructionless puzzle genre, and changing the flavor each time (from musical instruments to countries to card games) helps in the variety department.

SEASON 2, EPISODE 2:
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE

The words for the images in the bottom row are one letter short from being the words for the images in the top row:
Top row: ROBOT, TUBA, BERET, RICE, CHAIN, GLOBE, PINE
Bottom row: ROOT, TUB, BEET, ICE, CHIN, LOBE, PIN
The letters thus removed spell the final answer, BARRAGE.

Author's note: This puzzle's construction process was basically "use Qat to find pairs of nouns that differ by the given letter" and "find free clip art of those nouns".

SEASON 2, EPISODE 3:
PERPLEXING PAIRS

The answers to the clues are all of the form “something & something”. Although they are not clued in the order corresponding to the sets of blanks, they are clued alphabetically by their answers, and the inventory of letters given below the blanks also serves as a solving aid:
BAI[T] & SWITC[H] (Lure in a customer with a cheap item in order to offer an expensive item)
CH[E]CKS & BALANC[E]S (System where multiple branches of government all have some control over each other)
GI[L]BERT & SULLI[V]AN (The Mikado creators)
HID[E] & [S]EEK (Children’s game of stealth)
BRE[A]KING & E[N]TERING (Forcefully trespassing)
BREA[D] & BU[T]TER (Offering at a combination bakery/dairy?)
R[H]YTHM & BLU[E]S (Music genre derived from jazz)
The letters which appear in [square brackets] spell THE ELVES AND THE; the 9-letter word (as indicated by the blanks) which completes this is SHOEMAKER.

 

Author's note: Some solvers saw two 7-letter answers to the previous puzzles and were led astray by an expectation that all answers would thus be 7 letters long, thus being unsure whether to submit SHOEMAKER or COBBLER. The latter is attested to in some sources (which is sadly not an issue that arose during testing), so I hastily added 9 answer blanks to disambiguate.

SEASON 2, EPISODE 4:
SPORTS STATS STUMPERS

The numerical answers to these sports facts are as follows:
Topmost number on a standard dartboard: 20 (T)
Maximum roster size allowed in the NHL during the regular season: 23 (W)
Score of a tennis player who has scored once in the current game: 15 (O)
Maximum number of throws possible for one player in one game of bowling: 21 (U)
Number of flag posts in the perimeter area of a rugby union field: 14 (N)
Number of points a grand slam is worth in baseball: 4 (D)
Number of points the blue ball is worth in snooker: 5 (E)
Number of players on an Australian rules football team who are on the field at once: 18 (R)
Number of pawns on the board at the start of a chess boxing match: 16 (P)
Maximum number of yellow cards a soccer player may get without being dismissed from the game: 1 (A)
Peyton Manning’s retired jersey number for the Indianapolis Colts: 18 (R)
Since these numbers are no higher than 26, they can be turned into letters (using the standard scheme of 1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc.). These letters spell TWO UNDER PAR; in golf, a score of two under par is called an EAGLE.

Author's note: Some of my readers were avid enough sports fans to solve most or all of the clues without looking things up, which was impressive to me because I couldn't even name 11 different sports without consulting a list of sports from Wikipedia! The inclusion of chess boxing is admittedly cheeky. A common mistake was for solvers to stop one step short of the goal and submit the final clue TWO UNDER PAR instead of the common one-word term for that.

SEASON 2, EPISODE 5:
KEVIN WATCHES MOVIES

The identities of the movies are as follows:
“That movie in which a bus has to travel at 50 miles per hour or faster to avoid setting off a bomb”: SPEED
“That movie in which Adam Sandler can control reality with a magic remote”: CLICK
“That M. Night Shyamalan movie about crop circles in a cornfield”: SIGNS
“That movie in which Shia LaBeouf plays a boy named Stanley Yelnats who is forced to do a lot of digging in a desert detention camp”: HOLES
“That 1992 biopic about labor union leader Jimmy who mysteriously disappeared”: HOFFA
The logic puzzle solves as follows:
Speed was Thursday (by clue 1). The 5-star movie was not Monday (since by clue 4, the 5-star movie was the day immediately after Signs), Tuesday (since by clue 4, Tuesday was twice as many stars as Signs), Wednesday (since by clue 3, Wednesday was 1 star lower than Click), or Friday (since by clue 4, the 5-star movie was the day immediately after Signs, and Thursday was Speed); therefore, the 5-star movie was Thursday, and Signs was Wednesday. The 1-star movie was not Tuesday, Wednesday, or Friday (since by clue 2, the 1-star movie was the day immediately before Holes, and Wednesday and Thursday were Signs and Speed); the 1-star movie was Monday, and Holes was Tuesday. Wednesday’s Signs wasn’t 3 or 4 stars (since by clue 4, Signs was half as many stars as Tuesday); Wednesday’s Signs was 2 stars, and Tuesday was 4 stars. Friday was 3 stars (by elimination), and was Click (since by clue 3, Click was 1 star higher than Wednesday’s 2 stars). By elimination, Hoffa was Monday. In summary:
Monday, HOFFA, 1 star
Tuesday, HOLES, 4 stars
Wednesday, SIGNS, 2 stars
Thursday, SPEED, 5 stars
Friday, CLICK, 3 stars
Indexing into each movie title by its star rating (taking the 1st letter of HOFFA, the 4th letter of HOLES, and so on) and putting these letters in the order that Kevin watched the movies spells the final answer, and the title of the next movie that Kevin plans to watch: HEIDI.

Author's note: This is actually Grant's Puzzles at Home! The original puzzle was Wordy Wednesday 177, titled "Eliza Pseudonym Watches Movies" and published in 2017. The answer extraction mechanic is the same, but the actual logic puzzle portion is rather more difficult in that version with 7 movies instead of 5 and two extra variables (Eliza's friends and snacks) which serve no purpose except to heighten the difficulty of the logic puzzle portion. There was a bit of a dip in first-week solves compared to previous weeks owing to how easy it is to get lost in the weeds if you don't immediately stumble on the letter-indexing mechanic. Some solvers ignored the dates, sorted the movies from highest to lowest rating, and noticed that the second letters spelled POLIO, which was an unintentional red herring. Other solvers got the correct answer by writing the movie titles across the rows of the upper-right 5x5 box of the solving grid and seeing that HEIDI was spelled by the spaces corresponding to correct day/rating pairings in the grid, which isn't so much a different way of deriving the final answer as a different way of seeing it.

SEASON 2, EPISODE 6:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENTS

Each word on the list (and as unbelievable as this may be, they are all indeed words) has an anagram:
ETRIER → RETIRE
MELENA → ENAMEL
LAMPAS → PLASMA
MESTEE → ESTEEM
REALIA → AERIAL
RHYTON → THORNY
BAWLER → WARBLE
TIEING → IGNITE
SPITTY → TYPIST
COHEIR → HEROIC
ALBEDO → DOABLE
RHODIC → ORCHID
DRAPEY → PRAYED
CILICE → ICICLE
PEACES → ESCAPE
LIEDER → RELIED
The initial letters of the anagrams spell REPEAT WITH “DOPIER”; the word which is an anagram of DOPIER is PERIOD.

Author's note: There's nothing you can do to prevent solvers from cheating with anagram engines except to make the anagrams DOABLE enough that they will hopefully not resort to cheating as quickly. Interpreting the final clue is apparently difficult if you view DOPIER as an adjective and not as another 6-letter word you need to anagram, and thus try to find some noun hidden elsewhere in the unscrambled words which is being described as "dopier" in order to complete the instruction.

SEASON 2, EPISODE 7:
CONNECT THE PERI-DOTS

The grid solves as a Slitherlink puzzle as shown:

The letters not used in the solution spell TWO ON MOHS SCALE. The gemstone that is a 2 on the Mohs hardness scale is GYPSUM.

 

Author's note: This was the toughest puzzle in terms of first-week solves, largely because, for some shocking reason, solvers who aren't already familiar with the logic puzzle Slitherlink aren't going to think to look it up just because the two apparently random and unrelated words SLITHER and LINK appeared in the top rows of the puzzle. Even solvers who solved the Slitherlink got lost trying to read the letters on the loop instead of the ones not on the loop. Trying to hide the solution on the loop would make it too easy for an intermediate Boggle player to short-circuit the Slitherlink, though, so the letters not on the loop are the next most logical place to look.

SEASON 2, EPISODE 8:
THE ART OF THE MATTER

There is only one way to color the remaining regions with the four colors shown so that no two regions of the same color share a border:

For each region, the solver must find the cell in the table which lies in the column corresponding to that region’s number and the row corresponding to that region’s color. These cells, reading from left to right starting with the top row, spell FRENCH WORD FOR PENCIL. The French word for a pencil is CRAYON (the English word “crayon” is derived from it).

Author's note: There are several potential traps here. Inveterate logic puzzle solvers might at first try any of a number of incorrect rulesets, such as "LITS with colors" or "color the regions so that all of the ones of one color are connected". The correct ruleset is of a somewhat obscure puzzle type that Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection calls "Map", which is based on the four color theorem. A few solvers who didn't know what a Slitherlink was did not fall into such a trap, suggesting that the veterans were just overthinking things. The other common trap was to read the letters in the wrong order and struggle to figure out what FHORRPWCEIOLENRDFNC means; the row-by-row reading order was chosen to better camouflage the final clue from solvers trying to skip the logic puzzle.

SEASON 2, EPISODE 9 (META):
A META-PUZZLE WHOSE ANSWER IS “NEEDLE”

The grid depicts the solution to a word search puzzle, but with the circled words removed. The unused letters spell THING YOU MIGHT LOOK FOR IN A HAYSTACK, cluing the final answer NEEDLE. However, the solver was already told the answer to this puzzle, and needs to find its title instead.

If one treats the grid as a reverse word search, there is exactly one way to place the 8 previous answers in the circled positions:

The puzzle’s title now reads across the middle row: SEARCH ME.

Author's note: The MIT Mystery Hunt in 2014 had a wacky round which was played backwards – the solvers were given the supposed "answers" to the puzzles (for example "A Puzzle with the Answer CAN'T BUY ME LOVE"), and instead had to work out their "titles". The level of detail that went into these puzzles, including hiding the alleged "answers" in the puzzle while also hiding the "titles" several levels deeper in, is astonishing. This puzzle condenses the idea into just about the purest and simplest form possible.