Solution: Beyond Good and Evil
Answer: BALANCE CHECKER
Authors: Kevin Lin, Benji Nguyen
This puzzle begins by prompting teams to revisit and solve the feeder puzzles in a way themed around the seven deadly sins to get additional second answers to each puzzle. These sinful answers, as are hinted, are however associated with the wrong puzzle, and we need to pair them with their appropriate puzzle based on the sin used. The way we pair these and solve is by forming phrases by adding positive adjectives before the original answers, and negative adjectives before the sinful answers, and pairing up the positive/negative adjectives as antonyms. This is shown below, in the sin order (the rightmost column):
Puzzle (Good) | Answer Phrase (Good) | Index (Good) | Answer Phrase (Evil) | Index (Evil) | Puzzle (Evil) | Sin |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Worst Crossword Ever | [BEST] SELLER | 1 | [WORST] NIGHTMARE | 12 | Differences | Greed |
Oceans Apart | [SMOOTH] SAILING | 10 | [ROUGH] DRAFT | 8 | Worst Crossword Ever | Sloth |
Wordlele | [CLEAN] SLATE | 5 | [DIRTY] DANCING | 9 | Oceans Apart | Envy |
The Believable Untruth | [HEALTHY] APPETITE | 2 | [SICK] LEAVE | 3 | Wordlele | Lust |
Binary Choice | [LIGHT] RAIL | 4 | [DARK] MATTER | 9 | The Believable Untruth | Gluttony |
Differences | [HAPPY] CAMPER | 6 | [SAD] SACK | 7 | Colorful Boxes | Pride |
Colorful Boxes | [TRUE] BLUE | 8 | [FALSE] ALARM | 9 | Binary Choice | Wrath |
The pairing between puzzles and the sin extraction instructions can be found in the Puzzle (Evil) and Sin columns in the table above. The details for solving each sinful answer can be found in the corresponding feeder puzzle's solution.
Finally, indexing into these phrases according to the grid at the bottom, as indicated by the bolded letters, we get the answer, BALANCE CHECKER.
Author’s Notes
The idea of using good/bad adjectives to pair answers came naturally from the desire to have an answer and hidden sinful answer as the gimmick for the round.