In December, you were presented with an image of a chaotic mess of game pieces strewn across a table and some Christmas-y flavor text, but no explicit direction about what to do (other than the hint that the final answer is a single word).
Looking at the picture you might notice that the game pieces, when grouped by the originating game, were arranged into letters (colored above). When reordering the letters with the game boxes at the top of the picture, the letters form “MISSING ONES”… a decidedly TWO word phrase… so what are these missing ones?
Studying the game pieces more carefully, many (but not all, as hinted by the flavor text) of the games seem to be missing one piece (or type of piece). Ordering these in the same way, we get:
| Game | Missing |
|---|---|
| Uno | Yellow (of the four colors) |
| Catan | Ore (of the five resources) |
| Risk | Ural (of the Asian territories) |
| Monopoly | |
| Dominion | Silver (of the basic cards) |
| Scrabble | U tile |
| Sushi Go! | Nigiri cards |
| Chess | Kings |
| Clue | |
| Stratego | Miners |
| Bananagrams | Y tile |
Monopoly and Clue are the complete sets (Monopoly’s completeness is happily confirmable by the eight game pieces printed on the side of the box). Reading off the first letters of the missing ones, with spaces for the complete sets, gives:
YOU SUNK MY
Ugh, another multi-word phrase! However this phrase is completed by the answer to the puzzle, Battleship, to form the tagline of another classic board game.
Congrats to the December solvers for finding the hidden message!