Ship Battle
Answer: DELIGHT
Eric Wei, Misha Ivkov, Liam Thomas, Samuel Yeom

Sea Round

MARY MALLON

BISMARCK

HOAGIE

Pittsburgh Round

SCHOOL OF THOUGHT

NEIGHBORHOOD

PHOTO BOOTH


This is a puzzle about the board game Battleship. Each of the sea answers clues one of the ships in Battleship: MARY MALLON, A.K.A. Typhoid Mary was a Carrier of typhoid, the BISMARCK was a German Battleship in World War II, and a HOAGIE is also known as a Submarine sandwich.

In addition, the Pittsburgh answers each have a disproportionate number of Hs and Os. Each one has a number of H and Os equal to the length of one of the records of at-bats. This tells us which squares are Hits and which squares are Outs (misses).

Record of At-Bats:
NEIGHBORHOOD
G7 C1 J8 J7 G8
PHOTO BOOTH
I8 F8 G3 C7 J4 C3
SCHOOL OF THOUGHT
F3 H4 E7 C6 H8 G9 G4

Now, we can construct a Battleship game board. We're looking for a Submarine (length 3), Battleship (length 4) and Carrier (length 5). There is only one possible way to place these 3 ships given the record of hits and misses. In addition, we note that the lengths of the sea answers are each twice the length of the boat they represent, so we place two letters in each square of these boats.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
A
B MA
C O RY O O
D MA
E LL O
F ON O
G O BI SM AR CK O O
H O HO
I AG
J O O IE
TripletsAnswer
AngryMAD
Belief suffixISM
Expression of disgustICK
German grandmotherOMA
Long period of timeEON
MenswearTIE
Not wetDRY
Sister's husband: abbr.BIL
SwineHOG
UnwellILL
Viscous black liquidTAR
WitchHAG

Finally, to extract, we note that each triplet consists of two of the letters from one of the bigrams in the grid plus a new letter. Take the new letters from the hit squares to get the answer, DELIGHT.