CISRA Puzzle Competition 2012 - Solutions

4A. Take More Sides

This puzzle is reminiscent of puzzle 3B Take Sides, only without the clues to indicate what words need to go into the grid. The trick here is to figure out what words need to go into the grid.

The colouring here is more striking, and is reminiscent of the coloured striping of some national flags. Knowledge of some national flags, or a web search, may reveal that the names of the relevant countries fit into the grid, intersecting correctly. Some countries have very similar flags, but the word lengths disambiguate them. The filled in grid looks like this:

(We have necessarily had to take some small liberties with the colour assignments. In reality, the exact shades of colour used on national flags tend to vary from one another quite a lot. For example, the Netherlands blue is not really as light as Luxembourg's, but neither is it as dark as, say, France's. The Ukraine blue is not even formally defined. To make things practical for the puzzle, the blues have been assigned to one of just two shades in the grid. These necessary shifts should not prevent identification.)

Now, taking the circled letters, separated by colour gives:

White	LUBE
Red	INDOTPE
Green	SATR
Dark blue	UORF
Light blue	ERD
Yellow	GIHTL
Orange	ON

These can form sensibly related anagrams as follows:

White	BLUE
Red	POINTED
Green	STAR
Dark blue	FOUR
Light blue	RED
Yellow	LIGHT
Orange	ON

There are a few possibilities for how to assemble this into a phrase. As a web search may reveal, the flag of Aruba is notable for having a FOUR POINTED RED STAR ON LIGHT BLUE.

This fits the puzzle theme of flag colours, and the solution to the puzzle is ARUBA.