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⚠️  Note

This is an archived version of the 2026 Key Clues Challenge website. For information on the upcoming event, visit keyclueschallenge.uwaterloo.ca.

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Solution: Hashtag SEARCH
Answer: BLUE

This puzzle presents itself as 4 colourful grids, with another smaller set of coloured squares underneath them. Solvers may initially notice that some of the colours in the smaller squares match with the colours in the larger squares. However, this will not work for all of the colours– another step must be taken.

There are a few break-in points to figure out what step to do next, but the key step is to take the hex codes of all the colours in the grid, and then treat the result as a typical word search. This is clued in a few ways, shown below: The grids are 6x6 in dimensions.

This results in the following:

The words can then be found in the 4 grids, as follows:

When highlighted, these form the letters B, L, U, and E, meaning the solution to this puzzle is BLUE.

Author’s Notes

This puzzle was partially inspired by Colours in the 2019 Galactic Puzzle Hunt, but the general premise of hex-based wordplay (What colour is a cheap mattress?) has been something stewing in my brain for a while now. When I got the chance to write a puzzle for Key Clues, naturally, my brain immediately went to hiding a word search in a grid of colours. My only gripe is that I couldn’t find a good synonym of SEARCH that could be written exclusively with the letters and numbers in hex.

Additionally, trying to combine the meta limitations with the additional limitations of providing a thematic answer proved to be a challenge, and is what eventually led to the idea of “taking a macroscopic look” and spelling out the letters using the locations of the words. I’m happy with the final extraction of the word BLUE, although the answer is thematic enough that there’s a chance some teams guessed it by pure chance.