Puzzle - Snow Day Event

Question

Daisy, Delilah, Donny, and Duke have each decided to participate in the snowperson building event.

In decorating their snowperson, each of them has chosen a different colour of the scarf from purple, red, green, or blue. In addition, they have chosen one accessory from a top hat, earmuffs, flower, or carrot nose.

Daisy, Delilah, Donny, and Duke have all chosen to give their snowpeople coal buttons. However, each person has decided to give their snowperson a different number of buttons. One snowperson has 2 buttons, one has 3 buttons, one has 4 buttons and one has 5 buttons.

Using the following clues, determine the combination of accessories and buttons that each a person used to create their snowperson.

1. The snowperson built by Daisy, who is wearing the top hat, has one fewer button than the snowperson wearing the red scarf, but one more button than the snowperson with the carrot nose.

2. The snowperson wearing the blue scarf, who is also wearing earmuffs, has two fewer buttons than the snowperson wearing the green scarf.

3. The snowperson wearing the purple scarf has one more button than the snowperson built by Delilah.

4. The snowperson built by Duke is wearing the flower

You may find the table below helpful when solving this puzzle

Good luck!

Answer 1

Final solution

Daisy's snowperson has a top hat, green scarf, 4 buttons.
Delilah's snowperson has earmuffs, blue scarf, 2 buttons.
Donny's snowperson has a carrot nose, purple scarf, 3 buttons.
Duke's snowperson has a flower, red scarf, 5 buttons.

Step-by-step solution

Just using directly the information given (ignoring more/less buttons for the moment, as we'll come back to that later, but using the information that more/less means not the same):

(In the pictures I'm using red fill for no and green fill for yes, just to make it easy for myself when filling the grid.)

Then we know

red = flower, therefore red = Duke. Also, using top-hat = Daisy and blue = earmuffs, we know Daisy =/= blue.

Now let's start using the information about number of buttons:

• (Daisy = top-hat) has ONE FEWER than (Duke = flower = red) and ONE MORE than (carrot-nose). So (Daisy = top-hat) can't be 2 or 5, (Duke = flower = red) can't be 2, and (carrot-nose) can't be 5.

• (blue = earmuffs) has TWO FEWER than (green). So the former can't be 4 or 5, and the latter can't be 2 or 3.

• (purple) has ONE MORE than (Delilah). So the former can't be 2 and the latter can't be 5.

Now we have:

It's now clear to see that

flower = 5 and blue = 2, therefore blue = earmuffs = 2. So top-hat and carrot-nose must be 3 and 4 in some order, and we know from the first clue that Daisy = top-hat = 4 and carrot-nose = 3, which gives red = 5.

Now it's clear that

purple = 3 and green = 4, and by the third clue that means Delilah = 2, therefore Delilah = blue = earmuffs = 2. Then by elimination Donny = carrot-nose, so Donny = carrot-nose = 3. The rest follows easily.