Puzzling has a lot of really complicated stuff these days, so I just wanted to post a simple Boggle grid.
You know that game, right? You form words by starting from one letter, then taking adjacent letters moving in any of the eight directions, but you can't use the same letter twice to form a single word.
Here are the words you are looking for, they should be familiar to most of you:
time termination tetris nim animals real tangram pattern pangram game anagram flags nonogram
And here is the grid:
Um... that was not what the grid was supposed to look like at all! Have I got one of those newfangled viruses or something?
Since we're already here, can you help me recover my puzzle? I didn't take any backups while I was making this, and I'm really desperate to remember what it was like!
Luckily, the virus or whatever it was seems to have picked colorblind-friendly colors for the image, but if that somehow is still an issue here is a text transcription, in which different letters represent different colors:
ABCBB
CDEFG
HGABI
JKGGC
LMFMF
Answer
The answer:
rtitt
imena
sartp
lgaai
fonon
Explanation:
Here's the initial grid:
ABCBB
CDEFG
HGABI
JKGGC
LMFMF
Start by counting the number of occurrences of each colour (which I'll represent using capital letters):
A
×2,B
×4,C
×3,D
×1,E
×1,F
×3,G
×4,H
×1,I
×1,J
×1,K
×1,L
×1,M
×2and the minimum number of times we know each letter occurs in the final grid (I'll use lowercase letters for the letters in the eventual grid):
a
×3 (anagram
),i
×2 (termination
),n
×2 (termination
),o
×2 (nonogram
),t
×2 (pattern
), other letters could appear onceThere are a total of thirteen letters in the tags (
aefgilmnoptrs
), and thirteen colours on the grid, so there must be a 1-to-1 correspondence.I started off by looking at
t
,o
, andn
.t
must clearly beB
orG
, as no other colour allows for the adjacentt
s inpattern
. Looking at all the places we could possibly spellnono
(fromnonogram
), they must either be inB
andC
(some way round), or else two ofF
/G
/M
.The next letter to check was
a
. The requirement to spellanagram
means we can't havea
=C
(which would forcen
intoB
witha
asC
, or intoD
which isn't a valid location for it). We also can't havea
=F
, as that quickly leads to a contradiction:ABgBB ABgBB
gDmao gDman
HoABr or HnABr
JKoog JKnng
Lnana LoaoaIn other words, we've found our first letter position,
a
=G
(immediately forcingt
=B
to spellpattern
).AtCtt
CDEFa
HaAtI
JKaaC
LMFMF
no
now must beMF
(one way round or the other). This means thatp
=I
:AtCtt
CDEFa
HaAtp
JKaaC
LMFMFIf
M
=n
, then we can't spellpangram
. Thus,F
=n
andM
=o
:AtCtt
CDEna
HaAtp
JKaaC
LononTo be able to spell
nonogram
,anagram
, andpangram
, we needK
=g
:AtCtt
CDEna
HaAtp
JgaaC
LononTo spell
termination
, we needC
=i
:Atitt
iDEna
HaAtp
Jgaai
Lononand
ADE
need to spellerm
in some order (fortermination
); to be able to fittetris
in too we needA
=r
,E
=e
,H
=s
:rtitt
imena
sartp
Jgaai
Lonon
animals
requiresJ
=l
,flags
requiresL
=f
:rtitt
imena
sartp
lgaai
fonon
We can find all the words in this grid, so we know it's correct.
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