MEOW #61: Color Code

[Dplass]

Got it after a large nudge. Thanks for the puzzle!

[HeadinHome]

Not a clue what to do. ?? Will sing for nudges.

Got it .. thanks for the nudges!

[madhatter5]

Nudge Saturday!

Count how many cells there are of each color. Notice anything?

CYAN has nothing to do with the meta (saying this to dispel a very common rabbit hole)

The answer is five letters long.

[Cinny]

Had a nudge when this first came out, but it wasn't until I looked at it again this morning that it came to me exactly what needed to be done. Nice AHA moment. Fun puzzle, after all. Thanks, Josh!

[CPJohnson]

Finally got it, after Cinny's nudge. Thanks, Josh, and thanks, @Cinny !

[madhatter5]

Solution:

There are four colors in the grid: yellow, orange, green, and blue. If you spell out YELLOW in the yellow squares, ORANGE in the orange squares, etc. you fill the entire grid. The cells with letters in the corners will then spell out BROWN, which- is the meta answer.

[MarkWoychick]

I liked this puzzle a lot, though it took me a little while to solve it. I’m colorblind, but that is only part of the reason for my challenges - the bigger problem was my assumptions. I assumed at first that the letters in the grid belonged to the color names. With the C in the blue square, and me not being sure if it was blue, I thought, “PUCE?” I have trouble distinguishing blues and purples, so it seemed kind of plausible.

Then I saw @Dplass’s post to clarify for the colorblind, and noticed he called it blue, which led me to Cyan. By then I had started to think we were going to find a phrase. Going back to my days working at HP, I started thinking of CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black from color printing). Maybe “Orange is the new black?” No, there was no magenta.

I came back to the puzzle and noticed that the letters spelled COLOR, and made a quick solve of it from there.

Anyway, the moral of the story is not to get caught up in your assumptions about the meta, and I was pleased with myself for being able to do so (at least this one time!).

[KayW]

I'm feeling pretty stoopid - I still don't get it. Does someone have a graphic they can share? So the pre-filled C-O-L-O-R didn't stay in the puzzle? I couldn't figure out what to do with the C in the blue square if CYAN was not in the picture...

[Dannyvee]

I'm feeling pretty stoopid - I still don't get it. Does someone have a graphic they can share? So the pre-filled C-O-L-O-R didn't stay in the puzzle? I couldn't figure out what to do with the C in the blue square if CYAN was not in the picture...

There could have been check marks in the corners of those squares instead of the letters C-O-L-O-R

They were to designate which of the letters of each color you were to select

Not sure if I've explained that well...

[Dannyvee]

The funny thing was, I came to this forum to see the answer as I had gotten hung up on CYAN instead of BLUE.
But Josh hadn't posted it yet so I decided to take another look and figured it out.

[whimsy]

This help?

Yes, as Danny says, just pretend they're check marks --
but of course, the letters made it more of a RED herring!

[rjy]

Kudos for putting something different out there!

My hang-up was that I could fit the words in, but instead of starting at the beginning, I started each where the existing C-O-L-O-R letters fit with their words.

For example, YELLOW - for me - did not start with the 1st space, it started in the 2nd yellow square (row 1 col 4), so that the L and the O in the bottom row were in the right place. ORANGE started with the last square in row 1, GREEN started in the first square in row 3. It was a perfect pattern, which led to CYAN, and from there I couldn’t get anywhere…

Appreciate the challenge tho!

[vandono]

Oh, I way over-complicated this one. I thought it must be BROWN, with 'B' from 'BLUE' in the first marked cell and so on. But I thought the cells would spell words left-to-right and top-to-bottom so I'm over here trying to decide which letter from 'YELLOW' to put in the upper-left corner for instance (not including the 'O' and the 'L' which are obviously used in the bottom row for BROWN). Oh, well. It was a good mental workout in any case.

[Darth]

Nice one, Josh! Love the puzzle (now in hindsight)! I tried to do something similar to what @KayW and Ray (@rjy) did. Of course, BLUE has four letters, but that C in the box seemed to indicate CYAN... so I manipulated letters and was able to get ELEANOR in the final row... but it wasn't Eleanor Rigby (and wrong puzzle!),...so I decided to let it be.

I took the nudge and learned that CYAN was really RED as a herring, so I then decided that I MUST be color blind. BICE is another "blue" term with a C in it, but... really?? Duh...Darth! It seems I made this very straightforward puzzle more wicked than it was.

[KayW]

Doh! Thanks for the explanations @Dannyvee and @whimsy. And thanks very much @madhatter5 for a fun and different puzzle. I was color-blind in that I couldn't make myself see C-O-L-O-R as anything but the letters themselves.

[DrTom]

Kudos for putting something different out there!

My hang-up was that I could fit the words in, but instead of starting at the beginning, I started each where the existing C-O-L-O-R letters fit with their words.

For example, YELLOW - for me - did not start with the 1st space, it started in the 2nd yellow square (row 1 col 4), so that the L and the O in the bottom row were in the right place. ORANGE started with the last square in row 1, GREEN started in the first square in row 3. It was a perfect pattern, which led to CYAN, and from there I couldn’t get anywhere…

Appreciate the challenge tho!

I did EXACTLY the same thing and was therefore sure CYAN was correct, until of course Josh blue me away. The solution was easy once you saw the mechanism, but I am not sure I would have thought of it. Josh always manages to come up with something different that's for sure.

[Abide]

I'm a little backlogged on MEOWs and MOATS, but this one took me under a minute and did it in my head. I credit (blame?) Mystery Hunt puzzles.

Very neat idea!