Color-Coded is a puzzle from Round 1 of the 2021 Silph Puzzle Hunt. The puzzle presents a collection of rows of black and white dots, with strips of colors appended to each side, and lines connecting some circles to one another.
Solve Path
It can be reasonably assumed that letters are filled into the circles, each row spells a word, and circles connected by lines are the same letter. The colored strips on either end of the clue are the only other information the solver has to work with. As it turns out, each row consists of a single word than can be prepended to every color represented in the strips to make a phrase.
For example, the third line has black and pink strips with a length of 7. These colors can be prepended to the word PANTHER to make phrases, BLACK PANTHER, which is a Marvel superhero, and PINK PANTHER, a cartoon protagonist.
Solvers can use the connections between boxes to aid them in filling in each row. Once every clue is filled in, reading the black circles in order spells the clue BLANK MEAN TIME. Answering this clue yields the final answer.
