CISRA Puzzle Competition 2008 - Solutions

This is the archive of the 2008 Puzzle Competition. Please visit the current competition site for information about the latest Puzzle Competition.

A.1 Wordoku

There are only 9 different letters in the grid, so this can be solved like an ordinary Sudoku. Doing so produces:

A few words stand out: "the" across the top, "sea" in the middle, and "age" in the lower right. In fact, an entire phrase is written stepwise across the puzzle:

The letter E is used as both the last letter of "the" and first letter of "earthsea"; likewise the letter A is both the last letter of "earthsea" and the first letter of "archmage".

Wikipedia and/or Google reveal "The Earthsea Archmage" to be Ged, whose everyday "use" name is SPARROWHAWK.