CISRA Puzzle Competition 2011 - Solutions
3B. Puzzle Fun Placemat
What fun! Six different activities! All of them need to be completed to solve the entire placemat!
Starting with the word search, we can find the following 12 sports in the grid:
- BMX
- Darts
- Football
- Golf
- Hockey
- Karate
- Luge
- Rugby
- Skating
- Skiing
- Swimming
- Tennis
The left over letters spell "CRICKEET". This is the sport cricket, plus an extra letter "E". What's going on here?
The join-the-dots produces a picture of an elephant, except the position of the "T" dot looks wrong – it produces lines crossing right over the elephant's face.
The maze also has an error in it – there is no path connecting the "IN" and "OUT"! This can most simply be corrected by erasing a vertical wall near the middle of the maze – it looks like the artist has accidentally drawn an extra line in the maze. This mistaken wall has the shape of the capital letter "I".
The word unscramble puzzle produces the names of four farmyard animals, which fit into the grid as follows.
The highlighted letters are OREOSRAT. These can be unscrambled to form the animal "ROOSTER", but leaving an extra "A" left over.
The colour-by-numbers produces a picture of a train engine, except that one of the wheels is coloured incorrectly. The shape of the incorrectly coloured blue and yellow section of the wheel is a semicircle, resembling the shape of a letter "D".
Perhaps the trickiest puzzle to solve is the crossword. Following the clues gives a grid like this:
Except something is clearly wrong in the blank square. The 8 across clue clearly demands the answer "NAP", while the 7 down clue seems to want the answer "SNOUT", indicating an "N" where the "P" in "NAP" is. So where is the error in this puzzle? A sharp eye will notice that the clue "At the front end of a horse" can be modified by removing one errant letter to form "At the front end of a hose". This allows the answer "SPOUT" to intersect correctly with "NAP". The error in this puzzle is an extra letter "R" in the clues.
Putting the six error letters together we get "ETIADR". This anagrams to one English word: TIRADE, which describes what a Puzzle Fun Placemat might help prevent when visiting a restaurant with excitable children, and is the solution.