Advent Calendar: Day 7

[Kathis]

A week of puzzle?! what is this Christmas? Well for some of you I suppose. 

So hopefully you all have been having fun. Todays puzzle is known as a word jigsaw. 

 

Instructions are simple. 

Fit the pieces into the frame to form common words reading across and down. There's no need to rotate the pieces; they'll fit as shown, with each piece used once. 

 

 

 

That all said, the grey spots are what we need.  While it's possible to just do enough of the puzzle for the code, It probably is best to finish it... it's just good manners.  Start at midnight and work till noon. 

 

Good luck everyone

[The Chief]

Solved, This one gave my brain a workout. Great Job Kathis 

 

[Kathis]

Solution : TRAEEIIIETAKET

 

How to solve:  Honestly this one is a bit harder to explain how to solve it, besides "Put the pieces in the right place, and make sure all the words that form across and down make words."

 

The Chief had helped some others by letting them know to solve the biggest word first. and everything would fall into place.  So lets start there. 

 

So from that we can see that we have SCA _   ; T _ _   that require 1 piece of an L shape. (how did we figure that PRACTICES would be our word? I don't know, I just had 3 ├  shapes, and 4 ┼ our options were really limited.

 

_ _ ( ) ( ) ( ) _ _ [ ] [ ] 

for the ()  we had ACT ; OKS; PIP; and SPE
for the [ ] we had ND, ES, AC

so,

out of all the combinations there were only 1 possible answer. 

_ _ A C T _ _ E S = PRACTICES

All these combinations just didn't fit any English word that I can think of. 
_ _ S P E _ _ N D
_ _ A C T _ _ N D  
_ _ A C T _ _ A C
_ _ O K S _ _ N D
_ _ O K S _ _ E S
_ _ O K S _ _ A C

_ _ P I P _ _ N D
_ _ P I P _ _ E S
_ _ P I P _ _ A C
_ _ S P E _ _ E S
_ _ S P E _ _ A C

At this point it's just putting in pieces to figure out what fits. 

 

 

At this point you could look up the words in a dictionary if you are not sure about what a word is....but the code doesn't require you to know the words, persay.. you just need to know them to get to the highlighted spots. 

 

Starting at Midnight to Noon was your clue. This did require you to know an Analog clock, (sorry young kids, get a watch and learn to tell time that isn't digital.) 

Midnight starts at 12 o'clock which is at the very top, going clock wise we get the following. 

TRAEEIIIETAKE 
and since we're going to Noon, we use the T again from the top since noon is at 12 o'clock.

 

Thus TRAEEIIIETAKET