Answers to our Thanksgiving Logic Puzzle!

It’s been a week since Thanksgiving, so it’s about time we gave you the answer to our Turkey Day logic puzzle!

In case you missed it, here’s the puzzle:

Connor, Emma, Russell, and Taylor are celebrating Thanksgiving together. To save money, each of them is bringing a different side dish (cranberry sauce, green beans, mashed potatoes, or yams). Each of them is also bringing a different dessert (apple pie, chocolate cream pie, pumpkin pie, or sugar cookies). With the help of the clues below, can you puzzle out who brought which side dish and which dessert?

1. Emma didn’t bring the green beans, but she did bring pumpkin pie.
2. Connor brought the cranberry sauce, but he didn’t bring chocolate cream pie or apple pie.
3. The person who brought the yams also brought the chocolate cream pie.
4. Taylor brought the green beans.


Okay, last chance to solve it before we give you the solution!

Here we go!


Now, this isn’t as difficult as some of the diabolical brain teasers we’ve tackled in the past, but for someone new to logic puzzles and deduction, a puzzle like this can be daunting.

The key to logic puzzles is to organize your information in a simple and efficient way, so that you maximize the amount of information you glean from each clue.

So let’s list out our four holiday guests and all of the possible food options.

Now, let’s proceed through the clues and fill in our chart.

1. Emma didn’t bring the green beans, but she did bring pumpkin pie.

Since we know nobody brought the same dessert as Emma, we can black out pumpkin pie for everyone else, as well as blacking out the other dessert options for Emma, since each person only brought one dessert.

2. Connor brought the cranberry sauce, but he didn’t bring chocolate cream pie or apple pie.

When you add Connor’s info to Emma’s, you not only get his side dish and his dessert, since he didn’t bring chocolate cream pie, apple pie, or Emma’s pumpkin pie.

3. The person who brought the yams also brought the chocolate cream pie.

At first, this clue doesn’t seem to tell us much, because we don’t know who brought the yams or the chocolate cream pie. But we do know that Emma didn’t bring the chocolate cream pie, so she didn’t bring the yams either.

And if she didn’t bring the yams, the green beans, or Connor’s cranberry sauce, by process of elimination, she brought the mashed potatoes.

4. Taylor brought the green beans.

This last clue ties it all together. If Taylor brought the green beans, then Russell had to bring the yams. And since the person who brought the yams brought the chocolate cream pie, we know that was Russell as well, and Taylor brought the apple pie by default.

And there you have it. All that info in four simple clues.

We hope you enjoyed our little Thanksgiving logic puzzler!


Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay up-to-date on everything PuzzleNation!

You can also share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on TwitterPinterest, and Tumblr, and explore the always-expanding library of PuzzleNation apps and games on our website!

3 thoughts on “Answers to our Thanksgiving Logic Puzzle!

  1. Pingback: PuzzleNation Product Review: Zendo | PuzzleNation.com Blog

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s