Solution to the Christmas 2024 Puzzle

Yikes – I guess I made that one too hard! I got a grand total of two correct entries… the first one a little over an hour after the puzzle was posted, and the next one a few hours later… Mike showed some workings (with some traces of a few correct answers, and Brett showed me a picture of his workstation with one of the answers below his monitor… but neither submitted an answer).

... so what’s the answer then?

First off, you needed to solve the clues to some well-known(?) puzzles, so let’s do that…

Brian's tardis (2! Or 4! Or 9! For that matter…)	Telephone Box
Chambers, Rossetti & Stevens did this one (2!)	Loris
Dic's perforated pod	Holey Box Packing Puzzle
Diniar's clear box with red and blue bits inside it…	Sliding Tetris
Enright's second homage to a coin operated battle	Ms. Pack-Man
Frank's STPB (3!)	Simple Three Piece Burr
Gain's  attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one… (9!)	Superstrings
Hunter's steel orb of wonder	Venn Puzzle
Iwahiro's uneven one (2! Or 3!)	ODD Puzzle
Jerry's hanky (7!)	Mischief
Kosticks' bevelled (dimpled) box	Chamfered Cube
Markus' preposterous pachyderm prom (3!)	Crazy Elephant Dance
Miyamoto-san's whimsical strolling beetle	Walk of Ladybug
Robrecht's crypto conundrum (7!)	Bitcoin Maze
Stickman #18	Sphere Puzzlebox
The one BY made in PNGR where GPK went one better than BC	Ternary Burr
The one where GPK invites you to place bindings in a box (5!)	Chain-Store
Toulouzas' terrific table (5!)	Xenia Table Puzzlebox
Vesa's most murderous mirror mystery (IMHO) (10!)	Symmetrick
Volker does one for the little people	Euklid for Kids
What happens when Brian puts Piet's classic inside a diagonal burr (2!)	Insoma

Some of those would probably have just been obvious or easy to look up (13 and 16 respectively) and some may have required a bit more work (11?)…

OK so what were those numbers in brackets on some of the clues? – Well usually they’d clue the length of a crossword answer, but these have an exclamation mark, and some of the clues don’t have a number at all so this must be something else… now if you’ve solved the first clue, there’s a big clue to the numbers: did you spot that the 2^nd, 4^th and 9^th characters of the answer are all e’s… so extract those letters… and for the clues without a number, take the obvious one: the first letter of the answer.

…that gives you a string of letters that doesn’t appear very useful…

Now you might have noticed that the clues are listed in alphabetical order – something I did deliberately to throw you off – so how do you sensibly unscramble the letters?

Notice the italics in the flavour text? Referring to a conundrum competition – turns out there’s a rather well-known one each year, and it turns out that every one of these puzzles has been entered in the Nob Yoshigahara Puzzle Design Competition – you might have spotted that in your research to find some of the answers, I guess… each puzzle can only be entered once, so there’ll be a unique year for each puzzle, and that gives you the ordering:

w	2001	Walk of Ladybug	Miyamoto-san's whimsical strolling beetle
h	2002	Holey Box Packing Puzzle	Dic's perforated pod
o	2003	Loris	Chambers, Rossetti & Stevens did this one (2!)
n	2004	Insoma	What happens when Brian puts Piet's classic inside a diagonal burr (2!)
a	2005	Crazy Elephant Dance	Markus' preposterous pachyderm prom (3!)
m	2006	Simple Three Piece Burr	Frank's STPB (3!)
e	2007	Telephone Box	Brian's Tardis (2! Or 4! Or 9! For that matter…)
d	2008	ODD Puzzle	Iwahiro's uneven one (2! Or 3!)
s	2009	Sphere Puzzlebox	Stickman #18
t	2010	Ternary Burr	The one BY made in PNGR where GPK went one better than BC
i	2011	Superstrings	Gain's attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one… (9!)
c	2012	Chamfered Cube	Kosticks' bevelled (dimpled) box
k	2013	Symmetrick	Vesa's most murderous mirror mystery (IMHO) (10!)
m	2014	Ms. Pack-Man	Enright's second homage to a coin operated battle
a	2015	Xenia Table Puzzlebox	Toulouzas' terrific table (5!)
n	2016	Chain-Store	…the one where GPK invites you to place bindings in a box (5!)
s	2017	Sliding Tetris	Diniar's clear box with red and blue bits inside it…
e	2018	Mischief	Jerry's hanky (7!)
v	2019	Venn Puzzle	Hunter's steel orb of wonder
e	2020	Euklid for Kids	Volker does one for the little people
n	2021	Bitcoin Maze	Robrecht's crypto conundrum (7!)

…now the extracted letters give you WHO NAMED STICKMAN SEVEN – and a bit more Googling (or a visit to http://www.stickmanpuzzlebox.com/stickman-puzzle-gallery.html) will confirm that Nick Baxter named Stickman Puzzlebox #7 the Beast Box.

Thanks a stack to Nick for test solving it for me (well, I couldn’t let him play, could I!) and congratulations to Brendan Perez for sending me the following limerick an hour and eleven minutes after it went up:

To solve Walker's puzzle in rhyme

I've solved his questions taken in lines

You sort by the year

In which they appear

Nick Baxter's the answer this time.

 

Kudos too to Bill and Scarlet who’s haiku arrived a few hours later:

Puzzle pieces dance

Nick Baxter sees the chaos

Stickman builds the beast

 

I’ll be sending off something puzzling to you guys in due course (as soon as I’ve procured something!)

Next year I’ll make it easier… maybe. :-)