In the game of Letter Cubes, a different letter of the alphabet is on each face of each of the 4 cubes so that 24 of the 26 letters of the alphabet occur. Words are formed by rearranging and turning the cubes so that the top letters spell a common 4-letter word. The 14 words below have been made using today's cubes.

Can you recover the 6 letters on each die?

BECK
COZY
DEWY
FLAW
GAPE
JOVE
LAIR
MASK
PLOT
RASH
SAFE
SULK
TOWN
VOTE

(In reply to Explanation by nikki)

Argh...I left this lying around and couldn't submit it earlier. Now nikki beat me to it, but I put it on anyway. 8)
It's a different approach (I think nikki's is the better and less complicated one).

Let's start:
JOVE and VOTE are the only two words which have three letters in common (E,O,V). Therefore J and T must be on the same cube.

VOTE, PLOT and TOWN all have T and O in them.
E/V, L/P and N/W are each on one of the other two dices.
Now we have to find words which have one letter from any two of these pairs in them. Those must then be on separate die as well. Here they are:
DEWY - E and W
FLAW - L and W
GAPE - E and P
JOVE - E and V (like VOTE)
Now we know:
E, V, P and W are on separate die, thus E, L and N are on one and V, P and W on the other die.

So far we have (numbered for later reference):
1) J - T
2) E - L - N
3) P - V - W
4) O

We can now proceed with the same words we just used, because they each share two of the above letters and have two unknowns. These are:
DEWY - D and Y on #1 and #4
FLAW - F and A on #1 and #4
GAPE - G and A on #1 and #4
We immediately see that F and G are on the same die, but we don't know about D and Y as there is no word that shares one of them plus another letter we know the position of .

We must figure out the die with letter A, that will help a lot. As we have many words with that letter, let's pick those and see what we can find. We see that there are not only many words with A, but 3 with both A and S in them. Best we use these like we did with those above. While A and S are on two different die, the other two letters in each word are on the remaining two, thus we get 3 pairs:
MASK - M/K
RASH - R/H
SAFE - F/E (we already know that)
Finding words which share letters we get:
BECK - E and K are separate -> E and M are on one dice with L and N/F and K are on one dice -> we still have to find out R/H
Currently we know that A,D,F,G,K and Y are on die #1 or #4. Checking up with MASK this means that M and S are on #2 and #3, we already know that M is on #2, thus we can put S on #3.

Next we take words sharing A and R:
LAIR - I/L
RASH - H/S
Because a is on either #1 or #4 and S is on #3, one of R and H must be on #2. It cannot be R, because of LAIR, therefore it is H and R is on either #1 or #4. Since we know that A and R are on #1 and #4 and L is on #2, the letter I must be on #3.

Let's check back quickly what we know:
1) J - T - A/FGKR - D/Y
2) E - H - L -M - N
3) P - V - W - S - I
4) O - A/FGKR - D/Y

As you can see the sequence [FGKR] cannot be on #1 as this one has already three letters, so it must be on #4 and A is on #1.
COZY has both O and Y and this means that Y cannot be #4 and must be #1 and D is #4. C and Z are on #2 and #3.
Because of BECK the letter C cannot be on #2 (E is on this one), thus we put that on #3 and Z on #2. Only #1 is left for B. The only letter left is U and must be placed on #1.

Solution:
1) A - B - J - T - U - Y
2) E - H - L - M - N - Z
3) C - I - P - S - V - W
4) D - F - G - K - O - R

Edited on October 8, 2003, 8:02 pm

Posted by abc on 2003-10-08 20:00:33