Puzzle of the Week #477 - Twenty Sum Thing

Fill in all the empty squares of the grid with the digits 1-9, such that:

 1:            A diamond shape denotes that the four numbers adjacent to it add to 20.

2:            Every diamond uses a different way to add to 20, so if for example one diamond is surrounded by 1,2,8,9, no other diamonds can use those same four numbers, not even in a different order.

3:            Identical digits are not allowed to occupy adjacent squares of the grid, not even diagonally adjacent.

Puzzle of the Week #475 - Letter Pairs

Use the following letter pairs to form a series of words: a 4-letter word, a 6-letter word, an 8-letter word, a 10-letter word and a 12-letter word.

Each of the letter pairs can only be used once, EXCEPT for five of them.

Those five special letter pairs appear at the end of each of the five words, and also earlier in the same word. For instance if the 8-letter word ends in OR, it would need to be either:

(OR----OR), (--OR--OR) or (----OROR).

 

AH  AM  BA  ID  IO  ME  NA  NC  NT  OR  OU  RA  SE  SY  TA

 

Puzzle of the Week #470 - Word List

The following words all have something specific in common:

SCAR   THOU  NAPA  SOLE   TECH  DOLL   DIVE    DIVE    GALA

The order they are in is related to the thing they have in common.

DIVE is in the list twice – this is not a mistake.

 Which one of the following words also belongs in the list, and where in the list should it be placed?

 BECK   CLEF   PARA   PAST

Puzzle of the Week #466 - Perimeter

I’ve started with a 3x3 square, and divided it into 9 1x1 squares as shown. I’ve added four 1x1 squares such that for each of them one corner lies on a corner of the central 1x1 square, and the corner opposite that lies outside of the 3x3 square. I’ve used this as the basis of the lower figure, a bizarre 20 sided polygon.

What is the perimeter of this polygon?

Puzzle of the Week #464 - Mystery Word Game

A player plays a Wordle type game, where feedback is given after each guess. The player correctly finds the answer ‘DELAY’ on her fourth guess. Her guesses were:

 I  S S U E

A L A R M

B I D E T

D E L A Y

At each point the guess could have been the solution, in other words she hasn’t employed any clever elimination tactics. There were still a handful of other possibilities at the point where she got the answer, but it was not unreasonable that she guessed it after four guesses given the feedback she had.

What feedback was she receiving after each guess?

An extra challenge if you fancy it: find another word that still might have been the answer after the first three guesses, with the feedback as it would have been for DELAY.