Carl's Christmas Puzzle Hunt 2015

Welcome to the 2015 edition of Carl's Christmas Puzzle Hunt. If you're wondering what all of this is about, you can read the history of my Christmas puzzles.

Since I designed these puzzles for my sons, some of the artwork and imagery will have more meaning to them than it would to anyone else. But the puzzles themselves are all designed so that they can be solved using only general knowledge and logic.

The puzzles this year include word games (anagrams, cryptograms), logic puzzles (sudoku, star battle, fillomino, yajilin), and other classic puzzles (riddles, mazes, etc.) as well as a few unique surprises. Of course, there's also a big meta-puzzle to pull it all together.

I'm very interested in any feedback you might have, positive or negative, about puzzles, themes, difficulty, etc. So please share whatever comments you have. I'm also happy to confirm solutions to any puzzles in the hunt or to provide additional hints if needed. So feel free to email me at: Carl Worth <cworth@cworth.org>.

Solvers

The following individuals and teams have provided me with a correct solution to the entire puzzle hunt:

Cameron, Hyrum, Andrew, and Scott Worth: December 2015
Jigsaw (Andrew Bradburn): March 2016
DelphiRune (Steve Watt and Anita Hollister): July 2016
Conundrum (Robert Haight): July 2016

Errata

The following mistakes managed to creep into the puzzles and have not yet been corrected.

Remarkable Change: One change spans two rows. Take the letter from the lower of the two rows.
Be Prepared, My Boy!: The words TALKS and ARENA appear incidentally in the grid and should be ignored.
Olympian Teaser: This puzzle probably deserves some additional definitions for the six items/figures you need to determine. So use these hints if you are stumped (highlight the hidden text to reveal it):
- His ship shares a name with a 2012 Ben Affleck flick
- The preferred instrument of Gheorghe Zamfir
- More properly a "jar", it contained all the evils of the world
- An image of this goddess was used in Honda motorcycle logos in 1948 (today, only her wings remain)
- Their love began as a bribe from Aphrodite to win a beauty contest
- A son of King Telamon, his name today might appear more often under the bathroom sink or in web programming

The puzzle hunt is available in two forms:

Complete puzzle hunt (30-page PDF)

Download the Complete Puzzle Hunt.

Individual Pages

I designed these puzzles for my four sons at Christmastime. When we placed their gifts under the tree, we didn’t put any names on them, but instead each gift had one of the 16 rather puzzling tags you can find below. A correct solution for all of the puzzles will allow the solver to determine which of my sons should receive each gift. (My sons are named Cameron, Hyrum, Andrew, and Scott)

(Click on thumbnails for single-page PDF of each puzzle)