This month’s puzzle required a careful computation to remain tractable. One approach that would work: by keeping track of the position of the partridge figurine and the maximum count of identical figurines drawn before it as the twelve different sets of figurines were inserted into the permutation reduced the space into a matrix of size 78 x 12. The final expected value was approximately 6.859787.

Congratulations to everyone who found the expected value to within the requested accuracy.