Now I Know My 🐝🐝🐝s (Silph Puzzle Hunt 2021)
| Now I Know My 🐝🐝🐝s | |
|---|---|
| Silph Puzzle Hunt 2021 | |
| Round 1 | |
 | |
| Author(s) | Level 51 |
| Answer | Click to revealNEVER MIND |
| Statistics | |
| No. solves | 334 |
| No. total guesses | 451 |
| Links | |
| Puzzle | Link |
| Solution | Link |
| Checker | Link |
| Stats | Link |
Now I Know My 🐝🐝🐝s is a word puzzle from Round 1 of the 2021 Silph Puzzle Hunt. The puzzle presents itself as a series of tweets from user @cardinalcarp about the daily NYT Spelling Bee puzzles.
Solve Path[edit | edit source]
Each tweet is an independent Spelling Bee, and can be solved in any order. Each tweet contains definitions for four words, including a perfect pangram. Solvers are meant to find the words in that day's Spelling Bee by treating these definitions as standard crossword-like clues.
As solvers confidently fill in words from a particular day, they can fill in letters for that day's letter-bank, reducing the possible words for other answers from that day. Getting the perfect pangram for a particular day immediately fills the letter-bank, letting solvers know exactly which letters the other clues are constructed from.
In Spelling Bee, the letters are arranged in a honeycomb-like fashion, with the central letter highlighted. This letter must be used when spelling a word. Given the three words that aren't a perfect pangram for each day, it is possible to figure out the center letter of that day. There is always exactly one letter that appears in all three words, which means that letter has to be the center letter - if any other letter were the center, there would be a word that did not use that letter, breaking the rules of Spelling Bee.
Reading the center letter from each Spelling Bees in the given order spells the final answer.
Puzzle Elements[edit | edit source]
- Social Media - A themed framing mechanism for a puzzle, presented as comments about a particular game on Twitter by a user named...
- Red Herring - ...Cardinal Carp. While not exactly a herring, the "Shade of Red + Fish" method of marking red herrings is clearly alive and well.
- Spelling Bee - A fitting theme for the framing mechanism of the puzzle, as it's a type of viral puzzle that is often talked about and shared via social media. Click to revealIt's also a functional part, since solvers need to recreate the original state of the puzzle from the comments.
- Crossword Clues - While not traditional clues, each Tweet contains comments that clue four words that (in keeping with the NYT Spelling Bee theme) share the same 7-letter bank.
- Retrograde Solving - Solvers should be able to use the comments about particular word to reconstruct the original Spelling Bee boards (or at least identify what the center, always-used letter was), via...
- ...Shared Letters - Since the middle letter of a Spelling Bee puzzle must be used in every word, solvers can identify it by noticing that only one letter is used in all four words clued by the tweets. Since the tweets aren't presented with dates or times, one can just read these letters in the presented order to get their final answer.
