Nancy Drew: The Secret of the Old Clock Hints

How do I play this game with the golf balls?

• 1 of 11: Click on the machine shaped like a giant golf ball next to the gate to the golf course to find this game.
• 2 of 11: The point of the game is to find out what golf balls are hidden under the panel at the right. You do this by making guesses about the color and placement of balls in the rows at the left, then seeing how you did.
• 3 of 11: Every time you make a guess, the game tells you how many balls you got right, and you go on from there to make better guesses. A pole with no flag means one of the colors is right, but it's in the wrong place; a pole with a flag on it means one of the balls is the right color in the right place. The lineup is different every time, so I can't just tell you what colors to use, but you can do it, I promise.
• 4 of 11: Does this sound horribly complicated? It isn't as hard as it sounds. Here's a game I played recently and how it worked out. Again, this is just an example, but I'll walk you through what I did and why I did it so you can try to repeat the same concepts yourself. The picture below shows you what the game looks like at the end, and the hints below describe how and why I got there.
  • Golf Ball Game
• 5 of 11: Start out by keeping your initial guess simple -- pick balls of all one color. In the first round, I guessed all yellow balls, and got one pole with a flag. So I found there was one yellow ball somewhere. (If I'd gotten no poles, I would have tried four balls of a different color.)
• 6 of 11: In the second round, I wanted to figure out where the yellow ball was and also work on another color at the same time. I kept one yellow ball in the first tee and then added three red balls to the other tees. I got one pole without a flag. This tells me that I had the yellow ball in the wrong place (since I know there's one yellow ball in the answer somewhere) and no red balls (since I didn't see a second pole).
• 7 of 11: In the third round, I tried moving the yellow ball to the second tee. I put three green balls in the other positions, to see if there were any green balls at all. I got two poles with flags. This means I found that the yellow ball went in the second tee (one of the flags) and there was one green ball (the other flag). I can now leave the yellow ball in second tee on each of my next guesses.
• 8 of 11: In the fourth round, I kept just one green ball, to try to figure out where that goes. So I put the green ball on the first tee, the yellow ball on the second. I also put two blue balls in the remaining two spaces to see if there's any blue in the answer. Since I got three poles with flags, I found there was one blue ball and that the green ball went in the first tee. (The third flag was of course for the yellow ball I already knew I had right.)
• 9 of 11: In the fifth round, I left the green and yellow balls in place, but I put an orange ball on the fourth tee. I got two poles with flags (for yellow and green) but two poles without flags. This told me I had all the colors right, but that the blue and orange balls were in the wrong places.
• 10 of 11: And in the sixth round, I flipped the blue and orange balls to find the final lineup: green, yellow, orange, blue.
• 11 of 11: Now try it yourself, and see how it works! Remember, the colors are different every time, so your game won't look exactly like this one.
  • What does this poem mean?

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