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.

B.1 Boneyard

The title and layout of the grid are clues that the puzzle involves dominoes. There are 28 tiles in the shape of two joined squares, which match the number of dominoes in a standard "double-six" set. In domino games, the supply of unused tiles is called the boneyard.

The numbers listed above each column and beside each row indicate what digits are present in that row or column - but it's up to the solver to figure out the exact positions. The fact that each tile in a set of dominos is unique helps to solve the grid. There are two consistent ways to fill out the grid:

The ambiguous tiles are marked in red. We see that apparently the 4-4 tile equals the letter "W", and the 4-6 tile equals the letter "Y". This suggests a letter encoding scheme for the dominoes as follows:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z - -
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 5 5 6
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 3 4 5 6 3 4 5 6 4 5 6 5 6 6

Replacing the dominoes in the grid with the corresponding letters for the two possible grid solutions gives the following:

WESTOFH        WESTOFH
 BJCIQU         BJCIUQ
  KPX-N          KPX-N
   ZL-G           ZL-G
    MDA            MDA
     VR             RV
      Y              Y

We now see that the left layout is the one we want, because the phrase "west of hungary" appears across the top and down the right hand side of the layout. The answer is the country immediately to the west of Hungary, which is AUSTRIA.