And the correct answer to the “Coloring Book” puzzle was…
TOY JOY! With floor to ceiling toys ranging from nostalgic pieces all the way to modern pop-culture gadgets, Toy Joy has been supplying fun to the Austin area for over 29 years. With weekly game nights and other events, it’s impossible to be bored!
There are three elements to this puzzle that we can immediately notice. These are: the introduction paragraph, the crayon box picture, and the interactive color grid. The introduction text gives us a decent starting goal for the puzzle by saying “Help Jenny find her path, to gather a rainbow of crayon colors“. Looking to the grid of colors below, we see a START and END position. From these two clues, we may guess that our goal is to find a path from start to finish that uses the colors of the rainbow. By clicking the colored squares, the hues become more distinct. An observant solver will also notice that the letters of the word “colors” in the intro paragraph change when we click on the colored squares. This provides a check for when we have the right path. As the word “colors” will look like a rainbow when we find it. The correct path and fully colored word are below:
Once we have identified the path, we have two available sets of hints. The first is the numbers that appear on each square in the path before we click on it. These numbers in order are:
192113 211605 010308 040907 092016 010918
Some may notice that the digits 0,1,and 2 are the only ones to show up in the odd positions of each number. This hints that there are actually meant to be read as 2 digit numbers between 01 and 26, which means we may want to try a simple substitution cipher with A=1, B=2, etc. Doing this gives the phrase: SUM UP EACH DIGIT PAIR, a phrase which fits very nicely into the spaces on the crayon box.
Next, we need to use the second clue that we can obtain from our completed rainbow path. When we click on each square, we find one of the letter pairs: CR, AY, ON. This looks like a promising place to apply the clue phrase that we found earlier, but the phrase refers to digits instead of letters. At this point we need to utilize a few clues that we may have overlooked up to this point.
1) The word “hexed” in the intro text clues hexadecimal code.
2) Jenny’s Crayon Collection is mentioned in the intro paragraph and also on the crayon box.
3) Each color in our path has a name given to it below the color grid once we click on it.
These clues lead us to look up the various colors on the Jenny’s Crayon Collection website, where we find each color has a 6 character representation in hexadecimal code. For example, the first color in our path Mauvelous has representation: EF98AA
The last step is to keep the first, second, or third pair of characters from the hex representation depending on if the letters CR, AY, or ON are given in that color’s square. For example, Mauvelous has the letters ON in its square, so we keep AA. The full path gives us the characters:
AA 78 CD 82 D2 FA
Using our hint to add each pair and the fact that in hex code A = 10, B = 11, etc, we get:
20 15 25 10 15 25
And converting once again with our simple substitution cipher gives the final answer: TOY JOY
This week’s first-place Fastest Solver was Circles All the Way Down, followed by teams Aviation Laws in second and Codiak in third! Nice work, everyone!
Congrats everyone! And with that, the next puzzle, “A Not-so Stellar Sight” has been posted! Good luck and happy solving!
Note: Toy Joy is not affiliated with Mission Street Puzzles in any way.