Hints for “Oddball Quiz”

Having trouble finding the secret word within the oddball quiz?

See the description for basic information about this puzzle. Below, you will find several hints, which you can make visible by using your mouse to highlight the invisible text in each box (or triple-click within a box to highlight it all). Start with #1 and work your way down, but don’t read too many of them all at once.

If you’ve already started the puzzle, you can use your browser’s “back” button to pick up where you left off.

Hint #1:

You will not need to guess once you find the solution, you will know that you’ve got the right answer.

Hint #2:

There is no “end” to the questions. They will keep on coming.

Hint #3:

There is a fixed number of questions, but you may encounter the same question multiple times.

Hint #4:

Answering a particular question in a particular way will always take you to the same next question.

Hint #5:

Insisting on the correctness of the answers you are providing will get you nowhere towards the solution.

Hint #6:

In other words, whether the correct answer to a question is yes or no is incidental to the solution of this puzzle.

Hint #7:

It might be a good idea to create a map.

Hint #8:

The names of the individual question Web pages are important. You can find the name of a Web page in your browser’s navigation bar. For instance, the name of this page is “hints.html” (but only the “hints” part would be important, if this page were part of the puzzle. Names you might encounter within the maze itself might be “enigma” or “grumpy,” for example.

Hint #9:

You should use the Web page names to help create your map of questions and answers.

Hint #10:

One of the questions is not like the others.

Hint #11:

One of the questions is about me, the author of the puzzle.

Hint #12:

The real-life correct answer to that particular question is YES.

Hint #13:

Blue is my favorite color.

Hint #14:

All of the other colors you can see are just there to confuse you.

Hint #15:

Which particular words are blue is unimportant.

Hint #16:

The questions which include blue-colored words are all connected through their answers.

Hint #17:

In other words, you can go from the “first” question which includes a blue-colored word to the “last” such question by selecting the correct sequence of yes/no answers.

Hint #18:

The names of the Web pages containing blue-colored words in the questions form an English sentence when read in the correct order.

Hint #19:

There are eight questions containing blue-colored words.

Answer: (Don’t look unless you really know already.)

The secret word is PASSIONATE.