After today, Day 19, breathe deeply fellow puzzlers because there are only five more puzzles left. Can you see the finish line? Again, it bears repeating to mark off your calendar for next Wednesday May 10 at 1pm EST. Actually I plan to be refreshing like a madman for a couple minutes prior to 1pm EST atomic on the offchance that Google isn’t atomic synced (doubtful). If you are looking for an atomic clock to sync up to, try time.gov.

I noticed a couple people commenting that the puzzles change. Since my wife is also doing the challenge I’ve been able to observe the pattern of puzzle distribution to her as well and it has changed in a few cases. So when you see me writing about a puzzle you don’t have on a particular day, that’s not anything to get too alarmed about. I think it’s kind of cool that not everybody gets the same puzzle every day. Eventually you’ll get a similar puzzle. What would be really cool — and challenging — is if on the final day Google pulls out the stops and delivers hundreds of different possible puzzles making that final one the most challenging. I suspect the last one will be the hardest to complete. It should be anyway.

Looking back, today should have been the final 5×5 grid symbol challenge, right? Wrong. Google mixes in a sixth symbol making it a 6×6 grid. All I have to say about the complexity of this one is thank goodness there will be no 7×7 grids.

Tip: pay special attention to the colored backgrounds in the blocks. The six symbols are grouped there as well as must not be duplicated in any row (horizontally) or column (vertically). So if you get all the symbols filled in and it doesn’t pop the “you’ve deciphered the puzzle” success message then look at the colored groups. I had this problem initially and then moved around to comply with the colored groups to make all well. Took me an extra few minutes but I finally got it. This is a satisfying puzzle to solve. Kind of reminds me of a Rubix cube even though it’s only 2D.

Fortunately, Google does provide some symbols in default locations which makes this one a bit less complex to solve. This was the hardest puzzle so far for me to solve. How did you fare?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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