« return to puzzle

Cursed

Sofiya Cremin

First, you have to figure out what this puzzle is. It has the form of a cross sums (kakuro) puzzle, but the numbers are too large and suggest cross products instead. But that doesn't work either, since most of the numbers have one or two large prime factors. The flavor text hints that it is in hexadecimal, and so it is (but with the grid cleverly filled so that the products in hex use only digits 0-9). Solve it:

 8E7  B15  BC8 
3D1F  824  2143
1423  241  52D1
21854 137 81E27
 C7A685 214863
 2B689A 635A7F
    73   96
 8B326C 1623D5
 C4A519 321547
24351 632 3C291
1278  154  F1E4
3D1F  317  9682
 7E4  B7A  B8A

If you were paying attention while solving this you noticed the sparsity of the letters in the solution as well. The answer is formed by connecting the letters in order in each of the six sections of the grid:

  E   B    BC  
 D F  |    | | 
 |    |    | D 
 |    |    |E
 C A  |    | |
  B   A    A F
           
  B   C     D 
 C A  |    | |
 |    |    C | 
 |    |    F-E 
 D F  |    |   
  E   B-A  B A

So the answer is CIRCLE.