Monthly Archives: September 2016

Pentomino team puzzle

5 Replies

Here’s a team round I made for the Polish championships earlier this year. It was used for a casual team competition in the evening, between puzzle and sudoku championships.

It’s a two stage puzzle. The first part consists of dissecting some grids to form a set of pentominoes, which are then used as the pentomino set for a big Statue Park puzzle.

The puzzles are designed to be solved with a pair of scissors (i.e., cut up the dissection grids, then place the resulting pentominoes on the statue park grid). If you want to avoid that, you should be able to get a similar solving experience by only marking full pentominoes, and not marking empty cells for the Statue Park.

We went with teams of three in Poland, which is probably the best size for this.

Find the puzzles and original instructions below, or all in one PDF. (The PDF comes with the full Statue Park puzzle, and both halves as individual grids, for A4 printing.)

Continue reading →

Puzzle 132: Illumination

4 Replies

Here’s something new, though I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if someone did this before. There’s an example below.

Edit The example was buggy, should be fixed now.

illum-1

Rules Place some light sources and walls. Light sources go on grid vertices, but not on the border. Walls go on grid lines and must not touch light sources. Numbers outside the grid indicate how many light bulbs illuminate the adjacent edge in total, where a light bulb that illuminates the entire edge counts for 1 (regardless of distance), a light bulb that illuminates the edge partially counts for the corresponding fraction.

Exampleillum-example