December 2024: Games Night!
December 2024: Games Night!
Date: December 2025
Link: click here
Solved on: December 10, 2024
The Puzzle
We given an image of different board games on a table, and a short description. We are tasked with finding a one word answer. Click the puzzle link to see the image.
Initial Observations/Questions
- There are 11 games and some of their respective game pieces on the table, in a seemingly “random” placement.
- However, you can see that the pieces make up letters.
- Uno makes an “M”, Scrabble makes an “N”, etc.
- Also, I noticed first that Uno is missing all of its yellow cards.
- However, you can see that the pieces make up letters.
- Boxes/containers/cards of each game are placed conspicuously in the back of the table. Can this placement mean something?
- For example, why are the Uno cards placed halfway off the game below it? Seems like this was done on purpose.
Strategy
Note: The following strategy may not be the most efficient process to solve the problem, but it is how I went about it in my head.
With the first thing that I noticed (that the games make up certain letters), I collected all the letters and the games:
G - Sushi Go S - Banana Grams M - Uno I - Catan N - Clue I - Dominion E - Stratego S - Risk N - Scrabble O - Chess S - Monopoly
With no obvious unscramble of these letters, it caught my eye that the Uno cards were placed so weirdly on top of the Catan box. It seemed there needed to be a reason, and there was. If you list the letters above in the order of their corresponding games in the back, from top left to bottom right (Uno, Catan, Risk, Monopoly, Dominion, Scrabble, Sushi Go, Chess, Clue, Stratego, Banana Grams), you get the phrase:
MISSINGONES which when you add a space, MISSGING ONES.
From here, with some Wikipedia research (when I didn’t know about the game), you can identity the item that is missing from each game:
- “Y” letter missing from Banana Grams
- Yellow cards missing from Uno
- “U” letter missing from Scrabble
- Ore resource card type missing from Catan
- Silver resource card missing from Dominion
- Nigiri cards missing from Sushi Go
- Miner piece missing from Stratego
- Ural territory card missing (from Asian countries) from Risk deck
- King pieces missing from Chess
You can also notice that Monopoly and Clue aren’t missing anything. This connects to the prompt given “only managed to complete a couple of sets”.
By taking the first letter of each one of these missing elements, and putting them in the same order as the first clue, you get the phrase:
YOU SUNK MY
And since we are talking about board games, the obvious answer here is: BATTLESHIP.
Answer
Thus, the final answer to this month’s puzzle is BATTLESHIP.
About Me
I am currently a Sophomore at Northeastern University studying Computer Science and Mathematics, with a goal to work in the quantitative finance field. I love working through these type of problems and using code to make the solution more elegant. More information on me and some projects I’m proud of can be found on my website below.