Thanks for participating in this weekend’s 3 star riddle. We had 33 total submissions with only one being correct!
Therefore the winner was…
0x085843dbde124ab8babd558fea60534962628338
Congrats! Full list of submissions can be found here:
Now, let’s take a look at the solution for the riddle below..
- Although the riddle has a couple of places of entry that players may first get an idea for what it is they are aiming to do, the riddle has been made to primarily solve top to bottom. Starting at the beginning, that being the top row of images, players should easily realize the importance of working out what each image represents. One of these images is quite obviously a rose. By itself, this will likely not help the player, however in combination with one of the other images, an idea is likely to form. The fourth image is of a three- striped flag, with an arrow pointing to the center color. Although the image is done in different shades of yellow to make it look like gold, the shades have been chosen to show that each stripe is a different shade (although the actual color need not be discernable). Trial and error is necessary to figure out which flag it is, with the correct one being the French flag (the shades of gold on the flag were chosen to resemble the shades of the French flag, but were not meant, necessarily, to make it obvious that it was indeed the French flag).
As said before, the arrow points to the middle color of the flag, and the middle color of the French flag is white. So, with this, the player needs to combine the two pieces of information, that the flag is French and the color white, and find out the French term for the word ‘white’. When the player does this, they will discover that that word is ‘blanche’ (or ‘blanch’ when in the masculine form). Now, with two words being found, blanche and rose, if the players put ‘blanche rose’ into Google (or ‘rose blanch’, but if found this took a little longer to find the connection), eventually a result will pop up for the TV show, The Golden Girls. Seeing this, the players should make the connection that each of the four panels up the top are done in gold, making them ‘golden’, so they are on the right track. Looking at the other main ‘Golden Girls’ of the show, it will be found that one player is called Dorothy (a name for which Dot is a shortened form — represented by the second golden image), and the final character is named Sophia. Although this does not fit with the third golden image, which is the Japanese symbol ‘ma’, a little research on Sophia will show players that as her mother, Dorothy refers to Sophia by her widely known nickname, ‘Ma’.
2. Having now settled on the fact that the top row represents the TV show ‘The Golden Girls’, it is time to move to the second row. Looking at the images, it should eventually dawn on players that these represent the seasons — summer, autumn, winter and spring, then repeating the first 3 again. Although a connection may not be made straight away, eventually it should be realized that there are 7 seasons represented by the images, and there were 7 seasons of The Golden Girls, which is what the images represent.
3. Having broken down the riddle thus far from a TV show, now into its seasons, players should recognize that the next step is to break each season down into episodes. The four images in the third row of the riddle represent the name of an episode from the season they are connected to via a white line. One of these hints is relatively obvious when looking at the names of episodes from their corresponding season. The last hint, being the Roman numeral for ‘3’ and being linked to season 3, represents the season 3 episode ‘Three on a Couch’. The other three hints, however, each have either a few options to choose from within their respective seasons, or the hint is a little more difficult to figure out.
For instance, the heart represents an episode from season 1, which has episodes titled ‘The Heart Attack’ and ‘The Engagement’, both of which could be related to the image of a heart. The actual answer for that image, though, is the episode ‘A Little Romance’. This is the same for the image of the 2 rings, with episodes from season 6 called ‘Sister of the Bride’ and ‘There Goes The Bride’. However, this image represents the episode ‘Mrs. George Devereaux’. The final image, of the triangle, is the one that is a little harder for some to figure out. Players should notice that one side of the triangle is thicker than the others. This is because this is not a triangle, but the Greek letter delta. In mathematics, delta represents the difference between two things. Because of this, this image represents the season 6 episode, ‘What a Difference a Date Makes’. Because this image is harder to get, it is not absolutely necessary to solve in order to solve the puzzle, although it is helpful if it is.
4. Having now worked out the episodes(or potential episodes) each image int he third row represents, it is now time to move onto the final row. This final row is where there are many options people could consider, but only one that will work.
Having broken down The Golden Girls into seasons, then the seasons into episodes, it is now time to break down the episodes into an even smaller part. Given the numbers that represent this smaller part, players may consider things like scenes, or perhaps minutes, but what they should eventually end up on is what often makes a TV show what it is – the dialogue. Each number or word in the final row represents the position of a word of dialogue. For instance, the number ‘46’ means the player is looking for the 46th word in the respective episode, and the word ‘last’, means the player is looking for the last word in that episode.
The players can either look up an episode transcript online or actually watch an episode to find out the corresponding words, but both ways have pitfalls. For instance, when looking up a transcript, the episode ‘Three on a Couch’ has ‘2:00’ to be counted. Whilst players may count this as one word in a script, it is actually 2 words – two o’clock. Alternatively, when watching the episode ‘A Little Romance’, within the words to be counted, Sophia laughs sarcastically. Whilst it may sound like each ‘he’ in the laugh would be counted as one word, or maybe the laugh ignored, a transcript typically shows this a one word hyphenated (‘he-he-he’), so this is how that is counted.
Whether some words are initially missed in the counting or not, eventually players should be able to work out from surrounding words the correct count in order for a sentence to make sense. Ignoring sighs and other such sounds, the words found should be as follows:
With these words solved, players should now only have to look up the name of Blanche’s husband George’s brother’s name to get the answer:
JAMIE
