Kevin's Puzzles at Home Season 4: 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 8400. Thus, the final money pool for the Food Bank for West Central Texas is $84.00. Three anonymous benefactors have agreed to match this donation, meaning that the Food Bank for West Central Texas will actually receive $336.00.

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 5! The puzzles are already written and tested, so all that's left to do is wait patiently for September to roll around!

SEASON 4, EPISODE 1:
THE WRITING ON THE WALL

The bricks can be placed to form 8 9-letter words reading across:

One of the columns in the completed grid spells the final answer TAKEDOWN from top to bottom.

 

Author's note: This is based on a puzzle format familiar to some solvers as Pieces of Nine. A Pieces of Nine usually has two columns which spell things, which I imagine led some solvers to overthink the puzzle and think there was another column which they were missing, but otherwise the puzzle seems self-explanatory enough, aside from the final step, to warrant being the first episode.

 

SEASON 4, EPISODE 2:
BAFFLING BANNERS

As hinted at in the flavortext, these are maritime signal flags; they represent letters which spell the final answer ENCRYPT.

 

Author's note: This is basically the real Kevin's Fashion Show minus the fun presentation and Photoshopped shirts, but with a slightly more telegraphed hint at the maritime flags. I cannot prove it, but I wrote this puzzle before Fashion Show was published.

SEASON 4, EPISODE 3:
HUMOR ME

The words which complete these corny jokes are as follows:
“I worked as a waiter for four years. I was hired because I bring a lot to the TABLE.”
“How did the ocean greet the two beachgoers? It WAVED.”
“I sold my two vacuum cleaners because they were just gathering DUST.”
“I found four wooden shoes stopping up my toilet. It was CLOGGED.”
“The five bakers were very rich because they made a lot of DOUGH.”
“How did the five mathematicians travel to the geometry convention? Via PLANE.”
“I would tell four jokes about hats, but they would go over your HEAD.”
Each joke has a number in it. Indexing into the missing words by these numbers (taking the fourth letter in TABLE, the second letter in WAVED, and so on) spells the final answer LAUGHED.

 

Author's note: I pored through online lists of dad jokes to find material for this puzzle. I had to pass over many good jokes which relied on homophones or otherwise had ambiguous spellings.

 
SEASON 4, EPISODE 4:
GARDEN PATHS

The twelve flowers hidden in the grid are AZALEA, BLUEBONNET, CHRYSANTHEMUM, DAFFODIL, DAISY, GERANIUM, GOLDENROD, LILAC, MAGNOLIA, PERIWINKLE, PETUNIA, and TULIP. As hinted at in the flavortext and title, these are not hidden in straight lines, but along bending paths:

Six letters remain unused by these paths, which spell the final answer ORCHID.

 

Author's note: This is similar to a Penny Press word search format called Patchwords, albeit with unused letters and without the word list. Allow diagonals, and you get Kappa's Bent & Wiggly. Solvers unobservant enough to notice that none of the other paths have diagonals may end up with a slightly different path for DAFFODIL and thus a different unused D. Left over from an earlier idea for this puzzle is how the twelve paths actually make one single loop around the grid.

SEASON 4, EPISODE 5:
CONFOUNDING COLUMNS

When the letters are put in the columns in the right order, they spell “WHAT IS THE LAST NAME OF THE JAZZ SINGER WHO WROTE A MEMOIR TITLED LADY SINGS THE BLUES?”:

The memoir in question was written by Billie Holiday, so HOLIDAY is the answer.

Author's note: For the real Kevin's take on this classic puzzle format, see Letter Drop Soup. It seems that I cannot specify the "first name" or "last name" of a person without some solver failing to notice it and submitting the full name. Since this messes with the meta later, I cannot accept such answers as correct. C'est la vie.

SEASON 4, EPISODE 6:
WINDOW PAIN

The unique solution to the Fill-A-Pix puzzle is shown below:

The shaded cells form letters which spell the final answer GLAZIER.

 

Author's note: The word GLAZIER, referring to someone who works with glass (such as in making glass windows) is apparently just slightly obscure enough to reduce solvers' confidence in the answer despite it being spelled out. One solver even submitted GLACIER at first! But no, that is obviously a Z, not a C.

SEASON 4, EPISODE 7:
ARCHER RIVALS

This is an Akari puzzle, but with archers instead of lights, whose unique answer is shown below:

The example puzzle demonstrates the answer extraction mechanism: the solver must add up the column numbers of the archers in each row 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, the bulbs are in columns 4 and 9, which add up to 13, and the letter G shifted forward 13 positions in the alphabet is T. The resulting letters spell THE ANSWER IS BOWHUNT.

 

Author's note: The real Kevin's puzzle based on Akari is titled Target Practice, and features more explicit instructions and a more elementary answer extraction mechanism. I didn't initially intend to plagiarize the archery theme; the first draft of the meta had SOCKET as input, so the final message in this puzzle would have been YOUR ANSWER IS SOCKET. However, after changing the 8 prompts in the meta around, SOCKET no longer worked, but BOWHUNT did. While BOWHUNT is a legitimate compound word, its use as such is a bit obscure, so many solvers submitted the two words BOW HUNT. This doesn't affect the meta, so there was no reason not to accept it. The real Kevin's website isn't picky about spacing, either! If you liked this puzzle, you should look into buying Nikoli's recent book of over 90 Akari puzzles!

SEASON 4, EPISODE 8:
JUST HORSING AROUND

There are many possible knight’s tours which visit every square on the chessboard exactly once, but only one route visits the letters in an order which spells a sensible message in the blanks below the puzzle:

The message says, “ACCORDING TO LEGEND, EXCALIBUR IS THIS KIND OF BLADED WEAPON USED BY A KNIGHT.” This is a clue for the final answer SWORD.

 

Author's note: Knight's tour crypts are challenging enough to solve that I think putting this episode just before the meta was likely a good call. Pedants might take issue with the final clue; while Excalibur is a sword, and a sword can be used by a knight, Excalibur is not used by a knight, but by a king. One solver was stuck at "ACCORDING TO LEGEND", and wrote a computer program to work out the rest. Work smarter, not harder, they say!

SEASON 4, EPISODE 9:
THE ONE AND ONLY

Each of the previous answers can only fit in one blank such that exactly one of its letters fits the category indicated:
The one and only letter in ENCRYPT whose representation in Braille has an odd number of dots (one of ADFHJLMOQSUY): Y
The one and only letter in ORCHID whose representation in Morse code has at most one dot (one of AEGJKMNOQTWY): O
The one and only letter in LAUGHED which is in the second half of the alphabet (one of NOPQRSTUVWXYZ): U
The one and only letter in SWORD which is in the first half of the alphabet (one of ABCDEFGHIJKLM): D
The one and only letter in GLAZIER which can be a chemical symbol for an element (one of BCFHIKNOPSUVWY): I
The one and only letter in TAKEDOWN whose representation in Morse code has more than one dot (one of BCDFHILPRSUVXZ): D
The one and only letter in HOLIDAY whose representation in Braille has an even number of dots (one of BCEGIKNPRTVWXZ): I
The one and only letter in BOWHUNT which cannot be a chemical symbol for an element (one of ADEGJLMQRTXZ): T
These letters spell the congratulatory final answer YOU DID IT.

Author's note: This feels less like a puzzle to me than "follow the slightly complicated directions", and yet it has a certain charm as a conclusion to this season, and many solvers seemed to like it. I chose not to complicate things by having answers which could fit in more than one blank, nor by having answers with repeated letters; I used a spreadsheet to quickly confirm that every answer does, in fact, pair uniquely with a blank. The aforementioned early draft which had SOCKET as a feeder answer extracted the T as the only letter whose alphabetical position (20) is even; when I made the decision to use 4 complementary pairs for the categories because I failed to come up with 8 differently interesting ways of categorizing letters in two roughly equal groups, the odd/even parity of the letters' alphabetical positions didn't survive. I guess Braille, Morse code, and chemical symbols were more interesting, at least inasmuch as solvers might have to look those up! Plus, all of the vowels (AEIOUY) have odd alphabetical positions (1, 5, 9, 15, 21, 25), and virtually every word has one, so you know that you're probably getting a vowel as your odd letter. Boring!