Nancy Drew: Danger By Design Hints

How do I disarm the paint bomb?

  • 1 of 8: At some point late in the game, Day 3 or later, you'll return to the studio to find something weird on the brown door that leads to Minette's studio. What is that thing?
  • 2 of 8: Go ahead and look close at the device, but don't open the door or you'll set it off. We need to disarm this thing, and we need to do it quick, because Minette is getting restless with you fiddling around out here. You have about four minutes. Open the lid of the box and let's get started! (Read to the end of this hint for a picture of the completed circuit board.)
  • 3 of 8: The drawing with the triangles and circles on the box's lid is a guide to how the circuit should be set to defuse the bomb. It's a little confusing, though; what is it trying to tell us?
  • 4 of 8: What the triangles and circles are doing is showing you the rules governing the placement of the transistors in the circuit board of the bomb, the little ones that can be moved. It's saying that the pieces need to match either the color or the shape of every piece they touch. That is, two triangles can go next to each other, no matter what color; and two red pieces can go next to each other, no matter what shape.
  • 5 of 8: The difficulty comes in finding pieces that will go between two pieces with nothing in common, say a yellow square and a green circle. In those cases, you need to find a piece that matches the color of one and the shape of the other.
  • 6 of 8: For example, on the left side of the circuit board there's a red circle, a space, and a green triangle. The piece that goes in the space has to be either a green circle (matches the shape of the top piece and the color of the bottom) or a red triangle (matches the color of the top piece and the shape of the bottom). Get it?
  • 7 of 8: And just to complicate matters, the piece has to be the right way around -- horizontal pieces only fit in horizontal slots, and vertical in vertical. MY what fun.
  • 8 of 8: Here's a screenshot of the board correctly put together to defuse the bomb: