There are 20 rows of 5 emojis on the left. We notice that there seems to be a

As we identify the odd emojis out, we can add them to the grid by clicking on them. The grid on the right has 16 slots arranged into four rows, with additional emojis next to each row, along with a fifth row a bit below; this works out with our hypothesis of taking one emoji from each of the 20 original rows. The layout suggests that we are looking for four more emoji sets, in each of the categories related to

Note: Emojis in the original list are sorted by unicode number, both within each row and by the first of each row. This was not important to solving the puzzle.

We can arrange the odd emojis out in the grid as shown below. Potential ambiguities can be checked per row, although there is only one possible solution to the grid.

The remaining 4 emojis,

Author's Notes

This was inspired by an old puzzle (C. Steinhardt, BAPHL 4 “Something Isn't Right”) with a similar “odd-one-out, do it again” mechanic, but we wanted to add in a twist by mixing it with loose inspiration from the gameshow Only Connect. We also thought there was a lot of flavor and meaning packaged into each emoji, so we thought they would be a good source of data. We also wanted solvers to explore emoji they hadn't seen before, since there are so many! (and more got added between writing and running the hunt - we hope you encountered some new emoji!

Unfortunately, during testsolving we realized that potential ambiguities and red herrings were very hard to correct, even given the categories of the final grid (even in the final version, the set of "nouns that are verbs" had another unfortunate connection of removing a letter to make a new word), so we implemented the category checker at the last minute...

...which led to an unfortunate number of teams skipping the first step