Kevin's Puzzles at Home Season 8: FINAL RESULTS!

FINAL SCORES

Here is a table of all of the participants and their scores (click to enlarge). Kudos to the 9 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 7350. Thus, the final money pool for the Food Bank for Larimer County is $73.50. Three anonymous benefactors have agreed to match this donation, meaning that the Food Bank for Larimer County will actually receive $294.00. The total amount of money raised by Kevin's Puzzles at Home for various food banks now stands at $2,907.00.

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 January when I plan to launch Season 9! And come back next Monday for a special contest sponsored by my Outside the Box Puzzles subscription service. Yep, contests are coming back!

SEASON 8, EPISODE 1:
CONFECTION CONUNDRUM 

The names of the candies, which are helpfully described in alphabetical order (ALMOND JOY, LAFFY TAFFY, LIFE SAVERS, MENTOS, MIKE AND IKE, NOW AND LATER, RING POP, SNICKERS, SOUR PATCH KIDS, SWEDISH FISH, TWIX), can be written across the grid as follows:

Reading down one of the columns spells another candy, the final answer SWEETHEARTS.

 

Author's comments: Despite the fact that the real Kevin recycles puzzle formats as well, and despite the fact that such recycling has great potential for didactic purposes, I still feel a tinge of shame for doing so myself. For Kevin's Puzzles at Home veterans, there's no mystery how to solve this puzzle once you see that grid. That doesn't make filling that grid in or solving the clues un-fun, of course, but still. Maybe I'm my own harshest critic here; one solver reported, "A great puzzle, even if it took me a while! Despite my solving diet of American puzzles, a few of these were complete unknowns to this [resident of a country that isn't the USA]!"

SEASON 8, EPISODE 2:
CAN “EWE” COUNT?

The 9 different sheep which appear as large images on the bottom also appear in varying quantities amongst the flock above, and the title and flavortext suggest counting them:

Indexing into the alphabet by these numbers (1=A, 2=B, 3=C, etc.) spells the final answer ENUMERATE.

Author's comments: Nothing mechanically novel in the slightest. I suspect that the smartest solvers crossed the sheep out as they counted them. One solver submitted the incorrect answer ILLUMINATI for reasons yet unknown to me.

SEASON 8, EPISODE 3:
IT’S NOT ROCK-ET SCIENCE

First, the solver must fill in the blanks with the missing artists who performed the given rock songs:
“Tusk” – FLEETWOOD MAC (10:08)
“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” – ELTON JOHN (3:02)
“Jailhouse Rock” – ELVIS PRESLEY (1:12)
“(Don't Fear) The Reaper” – BLUE ÖYSTER CULT (11:10)
“Bohemian Rhapsody” – QUEEN (2:04)
“Armageddon It” – DEF LEPPARD (1:09)
“Let It Ride” – BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE (9:05)
“Walk This Way” – AEROSMITH (6:02)
“Bungle in the Jungle” – JETHRO TULL (5:10)
“Double Vision” – FOREIGNER (4:08)
The track lengths are not accurate; instead, they are to be used as indexes into the artist names. (For example, the track length of 10:08 means that one should take the 10th and 8th letters of FLEETWOOD MAC.) The letters obtained in this way spell MÖTLEY CRÜE DRUMMER LEE, a clue for the final answer TOMMY.

 

Author's comments: While the real Kevin's puzzles contain cultural references which are carefully carefully targeted at a younger solving demographic, such as Minecraft and fairly recent cartoons, I clearly have no interest in that sort of thing. One solver commented, "I like Kevin’s taste in music! Saw Elton John perform one of the first public presentations of Yellow Brick Road. Good times!"

SEASON 8, EPISODE 4:
SUBTERRANEAN STUMPER

The unique path through the maze is shown here:

The torches are arranged in 2x3 groups reminiscent of Braille dots; when the torches on the true path (highlighted above) are interpreted as Braille, they spell the final answer CATACOMB.

Author's comments: The real Kevin is certainly no stranger to simple mazes, nor to encoding things using Braille, but I don't believe he has ever attempted to combine them. There are arguably no new ideas, just new combinations of old ones. Wrong answers: DATA BOMB and DATA COMB, from a solver who tried to solve the puzzle mentally without printing it out.

SEASON 8, EPISODE 5:
CHALLENGING CHOICES

Each of the choices is between two words which differ only by the presence of an additional letter in the second choice:
ANGER, DANGER
NOSE, NOISE
BRIDE, BRIDLE
BRAD, BREAD
SALE, SALEM
SALON, SALMON
CART, CARAT
The extra letters spell the final answer DILEMMA.

Author's comments: This seems like it might be a bit underwhelming as far as Episode 5's go, but as a brief showcase of simple wordplay, it's all right.

SEASON 8, EPISODE 6:
WHAT WORD’LL BE THE ANSWER?

As hinted to by the title, this puzzle is based on the popular game Wordle, in which the player must guess a 5-letter word while being given green squares to indicate correct letters in the correct place, yellow squares to indicate correct letters in the incorrect place, and grey squares to indicate incorrect letters. Based on the initial guesses in the five games on the left, only one common word can possibly be the answer in each game (POLKA, BRAVO, JAUNT, KIOSK, TODAY), and these words can be transferred to the same-numbered rows in the game on the right:

 

The answer to the game on the right must be an anagram of the letters P, R, U, S, and Y. The word PURSY, in addition to being uncommon, would also require the P, S, and Y to be green rather than yellow; the only possible final answer is the more common word SYRUP.

 

Author's comments: When the real Kevin preceded this season of Kevin's Puzzles at Home with a series of puzzles with 5-letter answers, I was concerned that the meta would be Wordle-themed and make me look like a dirty rotten plagiarist for this episode. The meta was actually Mastermind-themed (think Wordle, but you don't know which letters are yellow and which ones are green, only how many). This worked out in my favor, I think; while Kevin's meta was more logic-oriented, this puzzle skews more heavily towards wordplay.

SEASON 8, EPISODE 7:
GET RECT

This is a standard Shikaku puzzle, except with some numbers missing. Its unique solution is shown below:

Indexing into the alphabet by the missing numbers spells the final answer DIVIDING.

Author's comments: My puzzles at home! Specifically, Wordy Wednesday 94, "Rectangular Blocks", published March 9, 2016. Besides shrinking the grid from 20x36 to 17x17, what really helped bring this puzzle down to a Kevin-like difficulty level was increasing the presence of large primes like 7 and 13, thus allowing for faster initial progress. 

SEASON 8, EPISODE 8:
ARE YOU READY “FOUR” A CHALLENGE?

The unique solution to the LITS puzzle is shown below:

The example puzzle demonstrates the answer extraction mechanism: the solver must shift the letter in each row forward by 1 position for each L tetromino, 2 positions for each I tetromino, 3 positions for each T tetromino, and 4 positions for each S tetromino (wrapping from Z to A as necessary). For example, in the top row, there is I L (1*1=1), 1 I (1*2=2), and 1 T (1*3=3), which add up to 6, and the letter L shifted forward 6 positions in the alphabet is R. The resulting letters spell ROGERS OF THE TETRIS COMPANY, a clue to the final answer HENK. (Henk's daughter MAYA is the president and CEO of The Tetris Company, but the puzzle specifies an answer without repeated letters.)

Author's comments: This is where the kid gloves really came off, judging by the slight difficulty spike! It's actually not too difficult if you're a very experienced LITS solver, but that's a big "if". It seems to be a given nowadays that the penultimate episode of Kevin's Puzzles at Home will feature some kind of logic puzzle, and after 21 people solved the KenKen/TomTom in the penultimate episode of Season 6, which I had deliberately toned down by only using 1- and 2-cell cages and including the operations in those cages, I decided it was time to see what my solvers were truly capable of. The 14x24 grid is larger than usual, and with no explicit instructions, unless you see the letters LITS spelled in the bold region shapes and know that LITS is a puzzle type, you probably aren't going to get started with this monstrosity. The "shift letters forward in the alphabet" mechanic is shamelessly borrowed from Pavel Curtis's Adalogical Ænigmas. Hey, it keeps seemingly working.

SEASON 8, EPISODE 9:
WHEN KEVINS COLLIDE

Pairs of titles are listed in this puzzle. The titles surrounded in wolf face emojis are the titles of the previous puzzles in Kevin’s Puzzles at Home Season 8; the titles surrounded in smiley face emojis are the titles of puzzles from the Kevin’s Puzzles website, run by Kevin Orfield, on which Kevin’s Puzzles at Home is based. All of these puzzles and their answers are available in the Archive section of the site. Comparing the answers in each pair reveals that they have the same length:
🐺Get Rect🐺                          DIVIDING
😀Friendly Words😀                    GIVEAWAY

🐺Challenging Choices🐺               DILEMMA
😀Myth Taken😀                        ARTEMIS

🐺Are You Ready “Four” a Challenge?🐺 HENK
😀Losing Battle😀                     FEUD

🐺It’s Not Rock-et Science🐺          TOMMY
😀A Picture’s Worth😀                 THUMB

🐺What Word’ll Be the Answer?🐺       SYRUP
😀True/False😀                        LYING

🐺Can “Ewe” Count?🐺                  ENUMERATE
😀Destination Vacation😀              COSMONAUT

🐺Subterranean Stumper🐺              CATACOMB
😀Complete the Set😀                  ARTICUNO

🐺Confection Conundrum🐺              SWEETHEARTS
😀Nearly There😀                      TALLAHASSEE
As hinted at by the mention in the flavortext of what the two Kevins have in common, the solver must identify the letters which appear in the same place in each answer pair, bolded and underlined above. These letters spell the final answer, I’VE MET MY MATCH.

Author's comments: Have you been paying attention to the fact that this puzzle series is inspired by Kevin Orfield's website Kevin's Puzzles, which I keep mentioning at the beginning of every season and at the bottom of every post since Season 7? Judging by the difficulty of this meta, which only got 11 first-week solves, you probably haven't! Seriously, go give that website a visit every week. Orfield's output is impressive in quantity! Unfortunately, as of this writing, Kevin's website is largely out of order: "The website suffered a fatal WordPress error on Friday, 8 November. I have been working to get it back up, but it seems impossible." This happened a few days before the KPAH deadline, but since nobody emailed me about it and last week solves are generally very few and far between, I doubt this affected the outcome at all.