Jane Street Puzzle - December 2024

The Solution

The aim of this month's puzzle is to extract a single-word solution from the given image. The image contains 11 board games, with the pieces or cards of each spelling out specific letters. If you go through each game and get it's corresponding letter, you get:

• Chess: O
• Bananagrams: S
• Sushi Go: G
• Clue: N
• Monopoly: S
• Uno: M
• Dominion: I
• Stratego: E
• Risk: S
• Scrabble: N
• Catan: I

This gives us the letters: OSGNSMIESNI

An online anagram solver shows this doesn't represent a single word. However, if you use two words, we get:

MISSING ONES

The prompt mentions that the elves got distracted and didn’t complete some sets, which aligns with this phrase. Upon closer inspection, most of the board games are missing something. For example, the chess set is missing the kings.

Missing Pieces

I lost the notes I made while solving this, but here are some that I remember:

• Uno is missing a yellow card
• Catan is missing an 'Ore' card
• Scrabble has a missing 'U' piece
• Sushi Go is missing all the cards that end in 'Nigiri'
• etc...

Monopoly and Clue are not mising anything, which makes sense since the prompt tells us that the elves completed a couple of sets.

Analyzing the Missing Pieces

Figuring out what was missing from each game was quite annoying and tedious. For example, when looking up the different cards involved in 'Dominion', I was initially considering a version with extension packs included which threw me off for a bit.

The fact that Scrabble and Bananagrams both give us a direct letter suggest that each game should also do so. For example, since Sushi Go doesn't contain all the 'Nigiri' cards, Sushi Go might represent 'N'.

• Uno: Y (from 'Yellow')
• Catan: O (from 'Ore)
• Chess: K (from 'King')
• Sushi Go: N (from the missing 'Nigiri' cards)

In puzzles like these, I think it's a good strategy to consider potentially non-arbitrary elements.

For instance, I thought that there might be some connection between the missing game pieces for each game, and the letter that that game spells out. For example:

Chess : Missing K : Shape O

But this didn't lead anywhere. Another thing to look at though is the positioning of the games themselves at the top of the image. The positioning could be arbitrary, but it could also contain a hint.

Indeed if we take these as 'ordered' from top to bottom, left to right, we get:

Uno → Catan → Risk → Monopoly → Dominion → Scrabble → Sushi Go → Chess → Clue → Stratego → Bananagrams

Substituting the letter we get from the missing game into the above (i.e - substitute 'K' into Chess since the King is missing), and treat the completed games (Clue and Monopoly), as empty spaces, we get:

Y → O → U → → S → U → N → K → → M → Y

'YOU SUNK MY'

Which when you google you see is part of a popular phrase 'You sunk my battleship', and so the final answer is 'Battleship'.