I've come across a puzzle which I think is impossible to solve without a huge amount of luck and randomness. It's puzzle 48 in the main story, and I've had to skip it.
In the puzzle, you have to put the words of ice cream flavours into the grid. The flavours you have are BANANA, CHOCOLATE, CARAMEL, COCONUT, LEMON, MOCHA and PISTACHIO. Words are placed like in Boggle, moving only horizontally or vertically. Spaces can be used more than once for the same letter. The first letters of words are placed outside the grid, and then you have to fit the rest inside.
The grid looks like this:
For the words starting with letters other than C, you can at least start off with the first letter. For LEMON, you can see that the word has to continue along the bottom, since you can't have a word starting "CM". But after that I get stuck.
I've had a load of goes at solving this, and nothing. I've tried terminating the PISTACHIO on the MOCHA's O, but that hems in the whole of the right side of the board. The hints suggest concentrating on the words starting with letters other than C (gee, thanks), and then the second hints says that the positioning of CHOCOLATE is key. That really doesn't help.
So, any ideas, anyone?
Update! Tom from Croatia (see comments) has solved it! The solution can be found on my new blog.
In the puzzle, you have to put the words of ice cream flavours into the grid. The flavours you have are BANANA, CHOCOLATE, CARAMEL, COCONUT, LEMON, MOCHA and PISTACHIO. Words are placed like in Boggle, moving only horizontally or vertically. Spaces can be used more than once for the same letter. The first letters of words are placed outside the grid, and then you have to fit the rest inside.
The grid looks like this:
B | |||||||
* | * | * | * | * | * | ||
C | * | * | * | * | * | * | P |
C | * | * | * | * | * | * | |
L | * | * | * | * | * | * | |
C | M |
For the words starting with letters other than C, you can at least start off with the first letter. For LEMON, you can see that the word has to continue along the bottom, since you can't have a word starting "CM". But after that I get stuck.
B | |||||||
* | A | * | * | * | * | ||
C | * | * | * | * | * | I | P |
C | * | * | * | * | * | * | |
L | E | M | * | * | O | * | |
C | M |
I've had a load of goes at solving this, and nothing. I've tried terminating the PISTACHIO on the MOCHA's O, but that hems in the whole of the right side of the board. The hints suggest concentrating on the words starting with letters other than C (gee, thanks), and then the second hints says that the positioning of CHOCOLATE is key. That really doesn't help.
So, any ideas, anyone?
Update! Tom from Croatia (see comments) has solved it! The solution can be found on my new blog.
13 comments:
I don't think it can be done!
If it can, then the top C is the start of Caramel, which then goes up to use the A from BA.
I was fairly sure that the two Cs on the side would be the starts of COCONUT and CHOCOLATE, since then you could get away with:
CH
COCO
or vice versa. But doing that leaves no room for the O of LEMON.
Unless, maybe, the end of CARAMEL can be the MEL from LEMON? Can I reuse that L?
I'd assume so. I'm wondering if you can reuse the same letter in a single word too - BANANA and PISTACHIO in particular.
Actually, it won't work. No matter how you arrange CARAMEL to connect to MEL, you're stuffed for either LEMON or one of the other two Cs.
Yes, you can definitely use one letter more than once - which means BANANA needs only one extra N next to the A - but even that doesn't help.
. . B . . . . .
. L A T E * O .
C O N U T S I P
C H O L A C H .
L E M A R O A .
. . . C . M . .
Tried Pepsiman's solution, and that doesn't work either. I suspect you're not meant to leave a gap in the top row. But adjusting it after that doesn't work.
The L in the middle is unused too.
. . B . . . . .
. L A T E T S .
C O N U T A I P
C H O R H C H .
L E M A I O A .
. . . C . M . .
hi i did it... took me a while.
ramelo
anutsi
hocach
emoloa
regards from croatia
Tom
Ah, no outside letter reuse.
Tom, you're a genius! I'll update the blog post to show the solution.
That Banana was cheeky!
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