Contests - Puzzle Prime

FEATURED

Puzzle Tournament 4

Section: Contests Category: Tournament

Tags: Featured

Puzzle Prime’s fourth puzzle tournament was organized on February 26, 2022. Congrats to REDCROUTONS who solved all the puzzles (even found a small mistake in one of them)!

You have 60 minutes to solve 6 puzzles, each worth 1 point. Upload your solutions as a pdf, document, or image, using the form below. Good luck!

Time for work: 1 hour

Each problem is worth 1 point. Use the form at the bottom of the post to send your solutions.

1. The Grid

by Puzzle Prime

Figure out how the last portion (7×5 in yellow) of the grid should be colored in black and white.

2. Hexado

by Dr. DJ Upton

Place arrows along hexagon edges so that the number of arrows pointing to each hexagon equals the number of dots inside, adhering to the following rules:

Arrows cannot be touching.
Arrows cannot be placed on dashed edges.

SHOW EXAMPLE

3. Segments

by Puzzle Prime

Use at most 27 segments to create the largest number with distinct digits.

Notes: For example, the number 273914 would use 5+3+5+6+2+4=25 segments.

4. Constellations

by Raindrinker

Connect the stars with lines, so that the number inside each star corresponds to the number of lines connected to it, and the number outside each star corresponds to the total number of stars in its group.

Note: No line connecting two stars can pass through a third star.

SHOW EXAMPLE

5. Chess Connect

by Puzzle Prime

The starting and ending positions of 6 chess pieces are shown on the board. Find the trajectories of the pieces, if you know that they do not overlap and completely cover the board.

Notes: The pieces can not backtrack. Two trajectories can intersect diagonally but can not pass through the same square. Only the Knight has a discontinuous trajectory.

SHOW EXAMPLE

6. Broken Square

by Puzzle Prime

Use exactly 5 out of these 16 pieces to build a 7×7 grid, without overlapping.

Note: You can rotate the pieces, but you cannot mirror them.

Puzzle Prime February 28, 2023

4 Comments

FEATURED

Puzzle Tournament 3

Section: Contests Category: Tournament

Tags: Featured

Puzzle Prime’s third puzzle tournament was organized on January 31, 2021. Congrats to Elyot G. who is once again a winner! You can see the problems and the rankings below.

You have 60 minutes to solve 5 puzzles, each worth 1 point. Upload your solutions as a pdf, document, or image, using the form below. Good luck!

Time for work: 1 hour

1. Constellation

by Raindrinker

Connect the stars with lines, so that the number inside each star corresponds to the number of lines connected to it, and the number in each barrier corresponds to the number of lines intersecting it.

Note: The stars in the corners cannot be connected, since the lines would pass through other stars.

SHOW EXAMPLE

2. Lineon

by Blaž Gracar

GOAL:
Move one of the Friends to the Exit Point.

PLAYING THE GAME:
Draw lines to move Friends. A move is connecting a point on the Grid to another point on the Grid by drawing a straight line. The line can be made in any direction, as long as it connects exactly two points and doesn’t cross or touch another line.

TIMELINE:
You move each Friend as many times as it says on the Timeline, starting with the topmost Friend and continuing in the order all the way down to the bottom one.

KEY POINTS, EXIT POINT, AND WALLS:
One of the Friends must move to the Exit Point, but before he does that, each of the Key Points must be already connected with a line. A Wall is a double line and no Friend can cross or touch it.

SHOW EXAMPLE

3. Vinculus

by Dr. DJ Upton

Circles are particles and lines joining them are bonds. The objective is to find all the hidden values, following these four rules:

Particle values must be the sum of their bond values.
Particles can have the following values: 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16.
Bonds can have the following values: 0, 1, 2, 4.
If two particles have the same value, the bond between them must have value 0.

SHOW EXAMPLE

4. Chess Connect

by Puzzle Prime

The starting and ending positions of 6 chess pieces are shown on the board. Find the trajectories of the pieces, if you know that they do not overlap and completely cover the board.

Notes: The pieces can not backtrack. Two trajectories can intersect diagonally but can not pass through the same square. Only the Knight has a discontinuous trajectory.

SHOW EXAMPLE

5. Murder Mystery

by Hiroji Osaka

In the three murder cases below, you can read the testimonies of all suspects. For each case, find who the killer is, knowing that no 2 people are in the same row or column, and that the killer was alone in a room with the victim.

SHOW EXAMPLE

Solutions

Results

Puzzler	P2	P4	P5	Total
Elyot G.	1	1	1	3
Leong W.	1	0	0	1
Chandan R.	1	0	0	1

REWARDS

The TOP 3 players will win codes for some of our favorite puzzle video games. Thanks to Other Tales Interactive, Thomas Bowker, and Daniel Nora for supporting our tournament.

Puzzle Prime December 28, 2021

0 Comments

FEATURED

Puzzle Tournament 2

Section: Contests Category: Tournament

Tags: Featured

Puzzle Prime’s second puzzle tournament was organized on June 27, 2020. Congrats to Elyot G. who solved all the puzzles! You can see the problems and the rankings below.

You have 60 minutes to solve 6 puzzles, each worth 1 point. Upload your solutions as a pdf, document, or image, using the form below. Good luck!

Time for work: 1 hour

Puzzle Prime Knight

Start from a square with a P on the chessboard, and keep jumping via knight’s move, consequently landing on squares with the letters U-Z-Z-L-E-P-R-I-M-E.

Point of View

8 of these diagrams correspond to views of the object in the corner when it is looked from different perspectives. Which 2 aren’t?

Note: The projections below are parallel (not perspective).

Chess Fight

Choose a chess piece on the board. Then, move the piece to a cell with another piece, and remove the first piece. Repeat, by moving the second piece to a cell with a new piece, and removing it. Continue until there is only one piece remaining on the board.

Note: For example, we can move the Queen on d2 to the Bishop on b2, the Knight on c3, or the Bishop on d4. If we move the Queen to d4 and remove it from the board, then we must move the Bishop on d4. The only available cell is c3, where a Knight is positioned. We must remove the bishop and move the Knight on c3 either to the Rook on b1 or the Rook on a2…

Special Date

On April 5, 2013 (5.4.2013), the digits used for expressing the date were all different and consecutive. When was the last date before it with this property?

Remark: The digits 9 and 0 are not consecutive.

Splitting the Area

You have 1 square with side length 1 and 2 circles with diameter length 1. Draw a single line so that the resulting areas on the left and on the right of the line are equal.

Notes: You need to specify how you find a line satisfying the condition above.

Chess Connect

The starting and ending positions of 6 chess pieces are shown on the board. Find the trajectories of the pieces, if you know that they do not overlap and completely cover the board.

Notes: The pieces can not backtrack. Two trajectories can intersect diagonally but can not pass through the same square. Only the Knight has a discontinuous trajectory.

Solutions

The answer to Point of View is C and J.
The answer to Special Date is 23.4.1765.
The solutions of the other puzzles are shown below.

Results

Puzzler	P1	P2	P3	P4	P5	P6	Total
Elyot G.	1	1	1	1	1	1	6
David R.	1	0	1	0	1	1	4
Rodrigo R.	1	0.5	1	0	0	1	3.5
N	1	0	1	0	1	0	3
Hristo H.	0	0	1	0	1	0	2
Rockmosis	1	0	1	0	0	0	2

Prizes

#1.
$10 Gift Card (iTunes or Play Store)
Puzzle Avatar (custom made)
Puzzle Pelago (mobile game by Hallgrim Games)
Hook (mobile game by Rainbow Train)

#2.
$5 Gift Card (iTunes or Play Store)
Puzzle Avatar (custom made)
Puzzle Pelago (mobile game by Hallgrim Games)
Hook (mobile game by Rainbow Train)

#3.
Puzzle Avatar (custom made)
Puzzle Pelago (mobile game by Hallgrim Games)
Hook (mobile game by Rainbow Train)

#4-5.
Puzzle Pelago (mobile game by Hallgrim Games)
Hook (mobile game by Rainbow Train)

Puzzle Prime June 1, 2021

1 Comment

Puzzle Giveaway 3

Section: Contests Category: Giveaway

Our third giveaway is over. Congratulations to Steven W. who won a whole pack of socks which he plans to wear in his future Escape Room adventures.

Hey, puzzlers, our friends at Soxy are offering their comfy socks in a new puzzle pattern and want to share 5 pairs with you. Solve the puzzle below, post the answer on our Facebook wall, and you can be the lucky winner of a whole set of fun socks. Click the banner below to check Soxy’s other cool items.

Last week, I got from Soxy 1 pair of brown socks, 3 pairs of brown shoes, 2 pairs of black socks, 2 pairs of black shoes, and put them all in a wooden chest. How many times should I pick a random item from the chest, so that I end up with all-matching shoes and socks to wear on Comic-Con?

ANSWER ON FACEBOOK

SOLUTION

You need to pick at least 14 items from the chest. If you pick 13 items, you can end up with 1 brown sock, 3 left brown shoes, 3 right brown shoes, 4 black socks, and 2 left black shoes.

Puzzle Prime January 24, 2021

2 Comments

Puzzle Giveaway 2

Section: Contests Category: Giveaway

Our second giveaway is over. Congratulations to the winner, M M Del Rosario, and to his nephew, who will have countless hours playing with all the wonderful toys we chose for him from Fun.com!

For our July giveaway, we are partnering with our friends at Fun.com, a great website for games, toys, and fun Halloween costumes. We have prepared for you a colorful picture with lots of hidden stars in it. Answer correctly what their number is and on the 15th of July, you could be the lucky winner who gets more than $100 worth of puzzles and games, including “Perplexus”, “Codenames”, “Manifold”, and many more!

GIVEAWAY

Puzzle Prime May 28, 2019

0 Comments

FEATURED

Puzzle Tournament 1

Section: Contests Category: Tournament

Tags: Featured

Our first puzzle contest is officially over. Congratulations to the winner Kuan L.!
Also, special thanks to Rajesh Kumar, Johann Sturcz, Dave Phillips, P. A. Heuser, as well as ThinkFun and Dover Books for contributing puzzles.

Time for work – 1 hour

1. Connections

Examine the diagram and find which pairs of letters are connected with each other.

Author – P. A. Hauser, published in “3D Space Mazes” by Dover

2. King Kong’s Maze

Detective Roy Omoshi (upper right) is chasing a dangerous criminal (lower left) through a destroyed maze. King Kong is trying to help Roy by putting together all the pieces of the maze so that the detective can safely traverse it. Analyze the picture and find the sequence of pieces Roy Omoshi will pass through before he catches the criminal. Some pieces (#1, #7, #8) consist of multiple horizontal segments, so it is possible that the detective visits them multiple times.

Author – Johann Sturcz, website – Johann Sturcz

3. Color Path

Enter by the bottom red path and exit from the top of the maze. You may retrace your path, but you may not make a U-turn on a pathway. You must follow the paths in the order red, blue, yellow, and then red, blue, yellow again, changing color at the white squares.

Author – Dave Phillips, website – Dave Phillips Maze Art

4. Amy’s Cats

Aunt Amy’s six cats have sat around the carpet, next to the thread, the pot, the cage, the coffee, the shoes, and the aquarium. You know that:

The two cats with bows sit next to each other.
The cats next to the bird cage and the coffee do not have blue eyes.
The two striped cats sit next to each other.
The weights of the cats next to the aquarium and the shoes do not differ by more than 3lbs.
There is a cat with a bell between two cats without long hair.
Pip Squeak sits next to Tom or Sassy (or both).

Find the names of the cats clock-wise around the carpet, starting from the left.

Author – Puzzle Prime, based on the game Cat Crimes by ThinkFun

5. Chess Connect

The starting and ending positions of 7 chess pieces are shown on the board. Find the trajectories of the pieces, if you know that they do not overlap and completely cover the board.
Notes: The pieces can not backtrack. Two trajectories can intersect diagonally but can not pass through the same square. Only the Knight’s has a discontinuous trajectory.

6. Sheep and Wolves

A shepherd takes his two sheep every day to a 7×7 lawn, so that they can eat the fresh grass there. However, there are five wolves on the lawn which are preying on the poor sheep. The shepherd decided to build a closed, non-intersecting fence around the sheep, so that all wolves end up on the outside. He planned the shape of the fence carefully and installed several signs showing the number of fence pieces around the corresponding cells. Can you figure out the shape of the fence the shepherd is going to build?

Author – Rajesh Kumar, website – Fun With Puzzles

Solutions

Puzzle Prime May 8, 2019

0 Comments

Puzzle Giveaway 1

Section: Contests Category: Giveaway

Our first puzzle giveaway is over. The winner, Ankush S., is not living in the US, so he decided to donate his prize to a children’s home in Illinois! As an appreciation for his gesture, we created one of our signature avatars for him. Congratulations!

Solve the puzzle below and post the answer on our Facebook page, for the chance of winning the puzzle game Cat Crimes, provided by our friends at ThinkFun.

On the image below you can see 11 points in the plane placed in such a way that there exist 6 lines passing through 4 points each. Can you place 10 points in the plane, such that there are 5 lines passing through 4 points each?

SOLUTION

CAT = 3, BOWL = 2, FISH = 1. The scratches represent Roman numerals.

4 (CAT with a FISH) + 6 (VI) + 2 (TWO FISH) = 12
1 (FISH) + 2 (BOWL) + 5 (CAT with a BOWL) = 8
5 (CAT with a BOWL) + 3 (CAT) + 3 (III) = 11

Therefore, the correct answer is 4 + 2 + 3 = 9.

Puzzle Prime April 18, 2019

1 Comment