8

A puzzle in the spirit of the Density™ puzzle. This one probably requires a bit of googling. Enjoy!

enter image description here

Final answer: (8)

Hint:

The tabs of the puzzle pieces are at most 2 units long.

Hint 2:

Ternary

Hint 3:

Just 4 u: Sometimes a number is just a number

Jens
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2 Answers2

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Solved at last! I believe that the final answer is:

KRONBORG or ELSINORE

The completed jigsaw looks like this:

enter image description here
(with different shades of red, dark grey and light grey to show distinctions between adjacent pieces)

Clearly we have here the words 'HOME LANGUAGE' on the background of the flag of Denmark. We will need to derive from the rest of this picture a word or phrase which has some relevance in the Danish tongue...

How can we find these words?

Let's first highlight the tabs between each piece (shown here in blue):

enter image description here

With the hints in mind we now see that in the three central 'pixels' of each tile edge that jigsaws into another tile we have:

Numbers written in ternary. Thanks to a prompt from the OP in comments we know we must read them by orientating each side towards the top before inferring a number from it. In this way we read the following:

Right-hand edges of top row:
010 / 001 / 201 = 3 / 1 / 19 in base-10 = C / A / S in A1Z26

Bottom edges of top row:
202 / 110 / 012 = 20 / 12 / 5 in base-10 = T / L / E in A1Z26

Right-hand edges of centre row:
002 / 002 / 120 = 2 / 2 / 15 in base-10 = B / B / O in A1Z26

Bottom edges of centre row:
200 / 122 / 120 / 202 = 18 / 14 / 15 / 20 in base-10 = R / N / O / T in A1Z26

Right-hand edges of bottom row:
002 / 002 = 2 / 2 in base-10 = B / B in A1Z26

Taken altogether, this reads: CASTLEBBORNOTBB.

So what does this mean? Well, realise that:

This is the phrase 'CASTLE BB OR NOT BB', or reading 'BB' as '2B' - or rather, 'to be' - it could be read as 'Castle, "To be, or not to be"'. Since "To be, or not to be" is a famous quote from the Shakespeare play Hamlet, what we are ultimately being asked for here is the name of the castle in the play, which after all is set in Denmark.

In the play itself, the castle is known as Elsinore. However, in Danish (Hamlet's home language) it is more widely known as Kronborg.

This satisfies the title since:

A castle from a Shakespeare play could certainly be considered a 'big playhouse'!

Stiv
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  • You are very close! To "read" a set of tabs rot13(whfg ebgngr gur chmmyr cvrpr hagvy gur frg bs gnof ner ba gbc). – Jens Dec 20 '19 at 16:06
  • @Jens Think I got there at last! Took me long enough - thanks for the nudge! – Stiv Dec 20 '19 at 16:51
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    Absolutely perfect! And yes, Kronborg was what I was looking for. Superbly done! :) – Jens Dec 20 '19 at 17:07
1

The tiles fit together as:

HOME
LANG
UAGE

With the stripes meaning:

the Flag of Denmark

Where:

The root language (of Scandinavia) is OLD NORSE (8)
but the answer should be one word, and I neglected the title...

The title refers to:

The Danish Royal Theater (skuespilhuset)

The tabs:

could be 2 digit binary numbers; perhaps coordinates
such as hh:mm:ss South, hh:mm:ss East

but I am lazy and lost...

amI
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    I agree with the first two steps, but how does the answer relate to the title? – Stiv Dec 18 '19 at 08:34
  • The first two steps are fine, but there are more clues in the puzzle. And the "Final answer (8)" means the answer is a single word with 8 letters. – Jens Dec 18 '19 at 23:26