Solution - A Round at the Golf Course

by Joseph DeVincentis

Answer: Click here to reveal

The pictures in this puzzle clue the items in the trading sequence Link uses to obtain the boomerang in the game Link's Awakening. These items are a Yoshi doll, a ribbon, dog food, bananas, a stick, a honeycomb, a pineappple, a hibiscus, a letter, a broom, a fishing hook, a necklace, a scale, a magnifying lens, and finally the boomerang.

Arrange the strips of squares along the bottom of the images in this puzzle into a large rectangle in this order to form a Number Link puzzle, which is solved in the usual manner of these puzzles: Connect each pair of like numbers with a path of orthogonally connected squares, without crossing any other path. The solution is unique.

Now the comment in the flavor text about this being a long journey (how long?) clue that you need to pay attention to the length of each path. This is one less than the number of colored squares in the path in the solution image (e.g. a path over 2 squares is a single link). These paths are 20, 8, 5, 19, 15, 12, 21, 20, 9, 15, 14, 9, 19, 12, 15, 18, 4, 12, 9, 5, and 18 links long. These translate into letters spelling THE SOLUTION IS LORDLIER, so LORDLIER is the answer.

The pictures of the blue ribbon, dog food, pineapple, and hibiscus are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). The blue ribbon is from wikimedia user MesserWoland. The dog food is from wikimedia user Ohiopetwatch. The pineapple is from wikimedia user Alvesgaspar. The hibiscus is from Eric Guinther. The picture of the Yoshi doll is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (CC BY 2.0) and is from BagoGames on flickr. All images were resized, some were cropped, some were converted from other formats, the Yoshi doll image was modified to remove extraneous elements, and the puzzle part was added, of course.