“Of Boys and Girls” Recap [SPOILERS]

And the correct answer to the “Of Boys and Girls” puzzle was…

HALLYU K-STAR ROAD! This road in Cheongdam has become a popular tourist attraction featuring 17 GangnamDols, human-size bear sculptures painted in the style of famous KPop bands and artists, from PSY and Super Junior, to BTS, EXO and many more. Some of the artists even visit the area regularly to surprise their fans!

This puzzle presents us with some lists of definitions, and a grid to fill. At first look, most of the clues are rather vague and could be solved several different ways (there are 12 different months, Deep Purple has 19 studio albums, 26 words in the NATO alphabet, and so on), but some are rather specific (the “Montreal commuter rail” is very likely the EXO, the “Scientific explosion” could very well be BIGBANG, etc.). Googling some of these easier words (or recognising them), one can discover the pattern: The solution set for each definition contains the name of a KPop boy/girl band (hence the name of the puzzle). This fact, plus the notion that words are sorted alphabetically per length helps narrow down the possible answers for each definition:

• Highest purity for a jewelry material: 24K
• Notorious rapper: BIG
• Acronym related to movie making: BTS
• Montreal commuter rail: EXO
• Mov. starring Will Smith: MIB

• 1970s rock subgenre: GLAM
• Sci-fi military videogame franchise: HALO
• Gritty film genre: NOIR

• Month: APRIL
• Hanna-Barbera canine character: ASTRO
• Letter in the NATO alphabet: ROMEO
• Shedding-card game: SPEED
• One of the five senses: TOUCH
• Double: TWICE
• Parts of a bird: WINGS

• You can find it on Spacex patches: CLOVER
• Famous British scientific journal: NATURE
• Black and white traffic sign: ONEWAY
• US department store: TARGET
• Title one can get in a competition: WINNER

• Scientific explosion: BIGBANG
• Common battery size: DOUBLEA
• Paul Harvey used to say this: GOODDAY
• Common character in social media: HASHTAG
• School subject: HISTORY
• Ghost: PHANTOM
• Cryptocoin related to space: STELLAR
• Female MGS character: THEBOSS
• Has been a WWF and WWE Champion: TRIPLEH

• Sweet pain?: CHOCOLAT
• Bookmark: FAVORITE
• Deep Purple album: INFINITE
• Common polygon: PENTAGON
• Book protagonized by Philip Marlowe: PLAYBACK

• Male significant other: BOYFRIEND
• What a student might do (while studying): HIGHLIGHT
• Type of cupcake: REDVELVET
• Number between ten and twenty : SEVENTEEN

Now that we have the right words (or at least most of them), it’s time to fill the grid. There are exactly the same amount of lines as there are words, which suggest putting one on each; moreover, writing down one letter per square. What about the long vertical rectangles? Well, that’s where words share a letter. This allows us to unequivocally fill the grid in a unique way.

Picking the letters in the yellow rectangles, and sorting them by numbers, we get the final answer, Hallyu K-Star Road!

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This week’s first-place Fastest Solver was Cardinality, followed by teams Davidsteinandfriends in second and teammate in third! Congrats!

And with that, the next puzzle, “K-Pop Hit,” has been posted! Good luck and happy solving!