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Letters In Boxes #27
It's time for another edition of Letters In Boxes Has Too Much Fun With Numbers! This is the 27th edition of our homegrown word puzzle series, and what is 27? A cube number! If you take 3 and raise it to the third power (3x3x3), you get 27. Since we won't be able to properly celebrate the awesomeness of cubes again until 64 (4x4x4), this puzzle series is dedicated to those classy cubes, too hip to be a square. Keep an eye out for cubes of all sorts: not just numerical cubes, but also three-dimensional cubes, because everything is trickier when you're inside the cube.
This week, we've got four more puzzles for you to tackle. If you're familiar with Letters In Boxes, you can jump right to the challenge by clicking on the image to the right to open up your first puzzle. If you're new to our game, we have a prepared a full tutorial on how to play to help get you solving our puzzles in no time. This batch of puzzles contains four puzzles to solve. On the fourth puzzle, you'll find the email address for sending your final answer.
We'll hand out a prize to the first correct entry we receive, plus one additional randomly-selected correct entry. Please include your Casual Gameplay account display name with your entry. You must be at least 13 years of age to enter. Only one submission per participant, please. Offer void where prohibited. Your deadline for submitting your answers is Monday, January 16th at 11:59 PM (GMT-5:00). If you're ready to go, grab the dice and get rolling!
already stuck on #2...
Any help on #1?
I've filled out the puzzle, but then I can't make out any coherent words.
hints for #1:
after filling the grid, there is one more step before actually making any words
the theme is important
after filling the grid, the numbers that were initially there should be ignored
The links in RSS and on the front page are broken.
And also stuck on #2.
The links in RSS and on the front page are broken.
And also stuck on #2.
Hint for #1
A scientific calculator with a cube-root function is essential.
Stuck on #2
So I fold them into a cube shape...then what?
Hint for #1
A scientific calculator with a cube-root function is essential.
Stuck on #2
So I fold them into a cube shape...then what?
I got #1 easily, and #2 wasn't too bad, but I have no clue what to do for #3.
Hint for #2:
Like tf58 noticed, you can fold the right part into a cube. Notice the black dot...
Another hint:
Letter orientation doesn't matter.
#3 is wonderfully baffling.
/headexplode
I got #1 easily, and #2 wasn't too bad, but I have no clue what to do for #3.
Hint for #2:
Like tf58 noticed, you can fold the right part into a cube. Notice the black dot...
Another hint:
Letter orientation doesn't matter.
Is there a relation with a dice in #2 ?
Also stuck on 3
Question about #3:
Does anyone have any ideas about the significance of the different colors?
Has anyone figured out #3 yet? Here are some of my questions. Perhaps one will help someone get the right approach.
Are the colors significant?
Is the orientation important?
Do the numbers even matter?
Does it have anything to do with the line "because everything is trickier when you're inside the cube" from the description?
Everything I've tried so far has not shown any results...
I'm still working on #2.
What is the significance of the dots and the shape on the left?
Looking at #2...
I can get two different letters for the box in the upper right corner. Anagrams including either letter (or even both letters) none work.
???
A small-medium hint for #2:
Build your cube, and then cover it in ink. The left side should be dealt with in two dimensions.
Meanwhile, I've gotten nowhere on #3.
OtherBill:
The correct solution requires you to get two letters in at least one spot.
For #3 I am still stumped. On the point of...
orientation, I thought I had a brilliant idea, but haven't been able to make anything tangible happen.
Oriented one way, a "3" is a "/" (division)
Oriented one way a 6 is an "="
A 5 is a "times", but technically a 1 could also represent multiplication.
The empty space on a 4 could be addition, but that is a real stretch.
None of this has led me anywhere new, but maybe it'll spark someone.
I'm still on #3 too.
What I've tried
is more along the lines of turning them from numbers into letters, whether it be individually or using the sum of rows/columns. I haven't gotten anything out of that though...
@ Phizzle and sarcastodon
Your hints helped me get #2. Thanks!
Got #3... a true feat of puzzle construction.
Unlike what I was thinking originally, you don't need to go inside the cube. The colors do matter, though. Study the white layer a little bit - those are your directions.
Welcome to the hard one (so far!), ray9na
Wow, #3 is a head-scratcher. Do we only need
the numbers we see? I assume everyone knows that
opposite sides of a die add to 7
but I don't know if that's relevant here.
@Phizzle,
Does orientation matter? Also, is there a difference between what red and pink mean?
Phizzle:
Do the pink v. red colors matter, or are you only speaking of white v. the rest? Does the black dice matter, or are they just placeholders?
Both of you:
Sorry about the ambiguity there. There's no differences between pink and red, just white, black and the center. The black dice mean nothing, and neither does orientation.
@Phizzle:
Thanks, that was the conclusion I've been at pretty much all day, but I appreciate the confirmation. Break time for me, maybe looking at it afresh later will help.
I'm assuming I'm on the wrong track on #2.
I created the letter cube. I tried orienting the dot to the 2d pattern, then exploding it to fit the pattern. No word there. Also tried building the letter cube inside-out and doing the same.
@ ron0
Have you ever played Bloxorz?
@ray9na
! Tried that once, but in reverse.
Thanks!
For #3
I think I understand why Phizzle says the black dice mean nothing, and I think I have a few ideas regarding the intended relationship between white and red/pink, but mostly I'm still casting about.
Question re #3
Does hex enter into it at all?
Not getting #2...
I see a word I can make with the cube on the right, but I have no clue what to do next.
#1, got no problem.
#2, I basically had to force my way through (though after looking back with my answer I saw where i was screwing up and it made perfect sense)
#3 is just making my brain go "Bububububububububwhat?!" I honestly can't bring myself to even attempt it.
@ nerdypants (Big, big hint!)
Make the cube, then pay attention to the dot on the cube and the other shape.
Pretend the cube is an inked-up rubber stamp. (Thanks, Phizzle @4:13pm)
Play Bloxorz.
Take the simplest route to fill up the other shape.
One square will have 2 letters. (Thanks, sarcastodon @4:14pm)
Follow your path to read your word.
Thanks, ray9na!
@ nerdypants
You're welcome, for whatever it's worth. I think most of us are stuck on #3. :-P
Yeah, I can't get #3 either.
I'm wondering if the triples are significant? Three ones, three twos, three threes, three sixes... But then what do the two five-six-sixes mean?
I also notice that there are no fours in the white sections, and only two fours in the red. I have no idea what it means, however.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone else finished? I want to see if I was first. :P
And a hint for those of you still suffering on #3 (definitely the hardest puzzle in this set):
Look at the white layer of dice. There are ones, twos, threes and lines with fives and sixes. What might those correspond to?
In addition,
There is math involved in solving this puzzle. Not any sort of complicated math, mind you, but math. No cube roots like you had in the first puzzle.
And a little bit more helpful hint, because you guys are more or less on the right track:
Each red/pink number is used exactly twice.
And the kicker (and maybe what you guys are sort of stuck on):
The fives and sixes of the white layer mean nothing whatsoever.
@Phizzie, first off, congrats on being first (assuming no one else steps up for that credit ;-}
Secondly, thank you for those great hints on #3!
On to #4 now!
For #3
Dare I ask if the arithmetic in question is addition or multiplication?
@ray9na
Well, you're going to have to turn those numbers into letters somehow...
So maybe you want to keep everything under 26...
(add em' up)
Thanks, zxo. I'm just not feeling very inspired this evening, and that block o'dice is rather daunting.
I'm certain I did #1 correctly, and I still can't make a word.
I solved the puzzle, got the cube roots of the numbers, and substituted using the basic alphanumeric code... but I can't unscramble the result into anything useful. I do notice it contains the letters C, U, B, and E.
...Good lord, I feel like a dunce now. On to #4.
@Andrew, for #1, did you take the (Major spoiler follows)
cube roots of horizontal numbers and read top to bottom?
Anyone have a spare hint for #4? I think I'm making things too complicated (again).
@zoz:
Think as literally as possible. It's very easy to make that puzzle too complicated.
In number 1, what do you mean by
cube root the numbers?
I agree that #3 is very clever (and that #2 stumped me for a while). Zoz, for #4, process of elimination is your friend....
If you make cubes (of course)...
There's only one way to arrange those cubes to satisfy the given condition.
Wow, the solution for #3 is surprisingly simple given how difficult it must have been to set up.
#4 was cute.
I finally got #3.
I was making it WAY more complicated than it was.
@jamedkan
treat the puzzle as a Sudoku, then ignore all of the numbers that were there and look only at the ones you filled in. Then take the cube root of each.
Still stuck on #4! I appreciate your hint @Phizzle (and I'm sorry I called you Phizzie before!) but I think I may have to sleep on this one.
THANK you @iq8w7ht! Something in your hint just made everything suddenly clear, as if a fog was lifted.
Glad to be of assistance - goodness knows I've gotten "Aha!" moments from plenty of others' hints in the past.
brief clues for this weeks puzzles:
#1
sudoku, cube roots, alphabet by the numbers
#2 the best hints have been given above, but here's a recap
make a cube, ink it, and play Bloxorz
#3
pinks and reds only; the whites tell you the order (ignoring fives and sixes); alphabet by the numbers
#4 (thanks to Phizzle and iq8w7ht!)
make cubes, then line them up
There, done....phew, that was a mental workout. X_x;
I 'cheated' for #3... because I read the hints before starting the puzzle... so I found it 'simple' and fun :P
I kinda liked how my answer for #4 (assuming it's the right answer) was
'self-checking', as in that the answer I got made sense literally, when put together with the sentence in the puzzle :D
I liked the 1st and 4th.
For the 2nd
There are two ways you might think to originally start and two ways you might think to decide which letter goes where. I chose wrong on both parameters. So if you get nonsense try to see what other ways there are to do it.
For the 3rd
There is lots of unneeded information (or at least I don't know what it is there for). Once I read Phizzle's comment that 5 and 6 on the white don't matter it was very simple to go with my initial idea of how to solve it.
Nice set of puzzles, possibly my favorite set yet. Frustrated that I couldn't get #3 - had all the pieces, but couldn't make it work - but still fun to solve when I finally figured it out (with help here, of course)
#3 was a hard nut to crack, but I can only imagine how tough it must have been to create.
Can somebody seriously dumb down number 3 for me please? I know I'm going to slap myself once it's explained to me but it's almost 3am and my brain has begun to melt out of my ears. I've read every clue for it in the comments and I still don't understand which numbers I'm meant to add together.
@Dandy,
view the pink/red dice as rows, with a white die at the top of each row (either 1, 2, or 3 dots on each white "topper").
Add up each row, keeping track of the topper for each row.
Major spoiler here:
you'll end up with 3 sums each for topper 1, 2, or 3 - 9 sums total.
All of the sums are numbers less than 26.
That's the best I can do without giving it away!
After figuring out number 3 after two failed attempts (if someone is interested, I got KFMBFEBEH and GLKDFIMFK on those attempts), I finally got the solution. That sure was simpler than my first reaction (wha-ha-ha-haat?), but like spaceloaf, I must admit I wonder how hard it was to set up the puzzle.
Gah! I *HAD* #3 yesterday except I was counting letters on my fingers and got some wrong (the second letter and the one that appears twice including as the last letter) which made no sense whatsoever except as some amusing anagrams. Got it first try this morning as the new hints indicated I was on the right track (thanks everyone!).
Lesson: don't try LIB when you're fasting before minor surgery.
I think I got #4. That is to say, I found a real word and it makes sense as an answer to the question.
I knew I'd slap myself once I got it. Thanks Zoz but your explanation wasn't what helped me. I was already doing what you suggested but I was like TaylorB, getting results with a lot of GFKLMs in it. It never occurred to me that...
The ones, twos and threes rows stretch over two sides of the die. I was only adding up one side and nowhere in any of the hints does anybody mention the rows contains six die faces. Damn you 3D!
As soon as I realised it, it was annoyingly easy...
I guess I'm more 2 dimensional than I thought.
I really enjoyed LIB, but they have gotten WAY too difficult for me. The first few LIBs were very simple, and even I could figure them out. You guys are brainiacs for creating these amazingly difficult puzzles, and my fellow gamers are just brilliant for being able to figure them out. Kudos to you for being able to stare at a bunch of numbers and letters in boxes for hours on end without going stark raving mad.
I liked #4, too. Was able to solve it in 2-D, which was nice :).
Can anyone help me on #2?
I started where the dot stands (and I was careful to match the place of the dot to get the proper cube orientation)... And since there are only two possible ways to get 2 letters in only one space starting in the dot(I think) I got two possible solutions... But none of them works... Any hint?
@Rgandum:
Take the simplest path (that is, fewest turns), but follow the path you take instead of reading top-to-bottom, left-to-right. Or if that's what you've been doing already, make sure the dot is aligned at the start, not just on the same square.
Turns out I wasn't aligning the dot properly... ;)
The #4 was really nice... It makes you laugh when you got the solution!
This contest is over! Here are this week's answers:
Puzzle 1
Puzzle 1 Answer
This first puzzle was a sudoku puzzle, and a fairly simple one at that. However, to find the answer of the puzzle, you needed to take the numbers you placed in each row and find the cube root of each of the numbers. For example, in the first row you would fill in the numbers 27, and the cube root of 27 is 3. From there, you'd use that classy alphanumeric conversion (3=C, 18=R, etc.) to spell the answer CRUSHABLE.
Puzzle 2
Puzzle 2 Answer
The figure on the right of the second puzzle can be folded up to form a cube (for this puzzle, the letters need to be facing out). When the cube is placed on the left-hand figure with the dots lining up, the cube can be rolled right, right, up, left, down, down, and down. In tracing this path, a different letter is touching the surface of the figure with each move. These letters, when taken in order, spell out SATIATED. (The F was a red herring.)
Puzzle 3
Puzzle 3 Answer
Starting from the white 1s, 2s, and 3s, three letters can be extracted from each row/column, wrapping around to include two planes. For example, the top-most white 1 led to the numbers 2/1/4/1/2/6. Each string of numbers could be added up to form one sum (in this first example, 16), which could once again be alphanumerically paired to a letter (16=P). When each row/column is solved in order (white 1s, white 2s, white 3s), you can spell the word PROGNOSIS.
Puzzle 4
Each of the five figures can be folded up to form a cube. Given the clue hidden in the riddle ("If the earth is below..."), the challenge was to find an arrangement of those five cubes so that the word EARTH would appear on the bottom. When the word EARTH is on the bottom, the word CLOUD can be found on the tops of the cubes.
Apropos of nothing, here's a bit more information on how these puzzles were made:
A lot of people wondered how much work it took to get the third puzzle to work. Disappointingly, it was actually probably the easiest puzzle in this series to make, if only by fluke. PROGNOSIS was the first word I could think of that used only the letters G-Z (it couldn't be A-F as the smallest possible sum would be 7, with 1/1/1/2/1/1). After I plotted out each letter's path, I did a quick bit of math to make sure it could theoretically work. I figured that so long as the numbers on the top of the cube totalled 30, the left side totalled 19, and the right side totalled 17, the puzzle should work perfectly. Could this process have worked with every valid word? I don't know, but I think I lucked out with a word that was easy to work with from the get-go.
On the other hand, the first puzzle took two or three times as long to create. After coming up with the idea, I made a list of letter/number pairs with cubes that could work in a sudoku puzzle (no zeroes, no repeating digits), and plugged those letters into an anagram generator to spit out suggestions. My next step was to try to create a theoretical puzzle setup with just the numbers in the letters, never mind a whole puzzle. As it turned out though, there were some issues with the first two words I tried (DULCIMERS and FEUDALISM), in that either it was hard to find an arrangement of the numbers in the grid so that digits could remain consecutive to avoid confusion (for example, ISM in the word FEUDALISM used the numbers 729, 6859, and 2197, which were very hard to place in three blocks together without repeating digits), or the theoretical setup couldn't result in a valid sudoku puzzle when filled. The third word I tried, CRUSHABLE, was the one to finally work.
The second puzzle was the last puzzle I made for this week. I wanted to do some sort of puzzle that involved rolling a cube to spell out a word, but couldn't figure out a way to make it work and guarantee one solution that wasn't too complex. I eventually figured out a working system by making a terrible paper cube out of my breakfast sandwich wrapper at the restaurant that I write most of these puzzles at and rolling it around on the table. Thankfully, there weren't many people around then to witness this.
Winners will be announced soon!
Update