Monthly Archives: April 2019

Puzzle 178: Times Zone

David Millar of thegriddle.net came up with a neat new type recently with Times Zone. It’s a hybrid of latin square and loop puzzle, where the numbers inside the loop (in the “times zone”) form products while the numbers outside form sums. Check out the Intro to Times Zone for detailed instructions and a walkthrough. Here’s one I made, enjoy:

Rules Fill the grid with digits 1-6, so that each row/column contains each digit exactly once. Furthermore, draw a single loop along the grid lines that doesn’t touch or cross itself.

The loop divides each row/column into groups of digits. Each such group of digits corresponds to a number; it’s the product of these digits if the group is inside the loop, and the sum otherwise. Clues outside the grid describe the groups in that row/column in the correct order; an asterisk (*) stands for an arbitrary amount of groups, including no group at all.

Puzzle 174: Slitherlink (Unequal Lengths), and Russian GP recap

This past weekend, the WPF hosted round 4 of the 2019 Puzzle Grand Prix, with puzzles by Russian authors. Puzzles/solutions/results are currently available under the previous link but should show up in the archive eventually. I’ll go over how it went for me below. One very interesting new variant on the test was “unequal lengths slitherlink”; here’s one:

Unequal-lengths slitherlink

[applet without answer check]

Rules Solve as a regular slitherlink. In addition, any two connected straight line segments must have different lengths.

Continue reading

Puzzle 173: Scrin (and release pzprjs v0.11.0)

I’ve wrapped up my recent changes to pzprjs in a new release, full changelog below. It’s live now on puzz.link. Please let me know if you find any bugs, or would like to contribute some missing translations.

The latest addition is the Nikoli puzzle type Scrin (スクリン); here’s a small sample puzzle:

https://puzz.link/p?scrin/6/6/g2h.zl.h4g

Rules Draw some rectangles, such that every clue is inside a rectangle (of the given size if specified). Different rectangles can only touch by corners, and all rectangles must form a single non-branching loop via these corner-connections. Rectangles without clues are possible. Continue reading