Tag Archives: hard

Puzzle 203: Slitherlink [just one segment]

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It’s always fun to figure out some new arguments in a puzzle type. While going through @taburega’s tough puzzles, I ran into one occurrence of a pattern I didn’t know before, and recently managed to distill it into something a bit more memorable while finding some similar arguments in a kwontomloop.com puzzle.

I’m curious how well known these techniques are, let me know! I hope to follow this up with a discussion of the “theory” at some point.

[puzz.link]

Rules This is a Slitherlink puzzles with many solutions, all of which share one segment. Find that segment.

Puzzle 202: International Borders

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Here’s a sample for another new type on puzz.link: International Borders by Palmer Mebane; the implementation was contributed by Lennard Sprong. This is probably not the most gentle introduction to the type.

[puzz.link]

Rules Shade some cells to split the grid into edge-connected areas of unshaded cells (“countries”), one for each color ocurring among the clues of the puzzle. Clues are unshaded, and each country must contain all clues of the corresponding color. (Uncolored clues may belong to any of the countries.) Clue numbers count how many of the four adjacent cells are shaded. Furthermore, every shaded cell must be a border cell: it must have at least two unshaded cells that are part of different countries.

Puzzle 197: Nurimisaki

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Following up the previous Cave, here’s a tougher Nurimisaki. Once you’re comfortable with the type, it might not qualify as “hard” anymore, but if not it will sure feel like it.

That puzzle type switched back to being a shading-first puzzle; I had previously made it an “unshading-first” puzzle for autocheck, but I’ve since changed autocheck for (some / most) shading puzzles to require all cells to be decided before triggering, so the major downside of shading-first is gone.

[puzz.link]

Puzzle 194: Double Choco

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Here’s another Double Choco, probably of similar difficulty to the New Year’s puzzle. I made this one as a “secret solver” present to a user going by the handle “taus” on the Puzzler’s Club chat; the layout is based off their avatar. (There’s a second partial attempt at theming this puzzle that’s a bit less in-your-face.)

[puzz.link]

Puzzle 149: Skyscrapers²

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The WPC 2017 in Bengaluru is over. Here’s a puzzle from my very thin set of preparation puzzles. It’s from a round with original types that applied the same set of rules “twice over” in a sense.

Rules Solve the grid as a regular skyscrapers puzzle, digits 1 through 5. In addition, small clues in the outer corners are skyscraper clues for the regular skyscraper clues along the outside. These 20 regular syscrapers clues are part of the solution.

For example, the regular skyscraper clues along the left side could be something like 1,3,5,2,2 to satisfy the second-level 3 clue in the top left corner.

Or see the rules of Round 20: Puzzle Fusion in the WPC instruction booklet, available at the WPC page. You can find an example there, too.

You can check your solution and solve online here.

Puzzle 147: Skyscrapers Domino Construction

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Here’s a puzzle that I made as a Christmas present.

skyscraper-domino-construction-tree

Rules Place the given set of dominoes in the marked domino tiles. Whenever two dominoes touch by an edge, the adjacent numbers must be the same. Clues outside the grid are skyscraper clues: They indicate the number of visible skyscrapers when looking along the corresponding row or column from that point, where each number represents a skyscraper of that height. Skyscrapers are blocked from view by those of greater or equal height.

Puzzle 142: Statue Park

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Here’s a Statue Park puzzle, with a full set of pentominoes. I made this one on the train back from the WPC in Senec, I still plan to post some thoughts on that some time.

In other news, I’ve been writing some puzzle sets for Nibbl (Android, iPhone). It’s an app that works as a solving interface and marketplace for handmade puzzles. See also Rohan’s announcement from earlier this year; the interface has been improved quite a bit since then. If you use my referral code ROBR9402 (or someone else’s), you’ll start with 100 credits, with which you should buy some of my star battle or skyscraper puzzles which came out pretty well.

I won’t stop posting here, though, don’t worry!

statue-park

Rules Place a full set of twelve pentominoes in the grid. Different pentominoes must not touch along an edge; they may touch diagonally. Black circles must be part of pentominoes, white circles must not. All cells that are not part of the pentominoes must be connected by edge.