Pure Loop This is a loop style puzzle. The loop passes all white cells and no black cells.
Expected difficulty Easy • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published
Puzzle 73: Simple?
Pure Loop
What the heck am I doing here…
UPDATE 14-Mar-2014: I just realized this puzzle type is called “Pure Loop”; Simple Loop is where you’re given some segments of the loop and must pass all squares/dots.
Short Yajilin Follow regular Yajilin rules: This is loop style puzzle. The loop may not pass through any gray cell. White cells not passed by the loop may not be orthogonally adjacent; note that a white cell not passed by the loop may still be orthogonally adjacent to a gray cell. A number with an arrow indicates the number of cells not passed by the loop, looking from the cell with the number in the arrow’s direction, up to the edge of the grid.
In addition, no straight segment of the loop may be more than two units long. In other words, whenever the loop goes straight through a cell, it must turn both before and after it.
Expected difficulty Medium-hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published
Puzzle 72: Drunk Man
Short Yajilin
Re title: Originally I wanted to give the variation name “Drunk Yajilin”, but that’s too weird. And well, drunk people can’t walk straight for long, or so the “usual” “sources” say.
Re difficulty: I consider hard. Prasanna says medium, close to hard. So let’s make it medium because Prasanna is more skilled and less biased (any author will be biased to their own works) than me.
Well… Not much comment, actually. My birthday is coming. All my puzzle projects (Fillomino crazy variants batch, Fillomino Variations pack, perhaps more that I don’t remember) are abandoned except for the upcoming LMI test in early 2014. Probably February, but not confirmed yet. I have homework and I make puzzles…
Mysterious Rules Given the initial puzzle state and the solution, deduce a probable set of rules.
Special Puzzle 12: Too Hard to Guess My Mind
Mysterious Rules
Solution
– Open room B, then close it.
– Open rooms C and E, then close E and C.
– Open rooms B, D, F, then close D and B.
– Open rooms C, E, pass through F, and open G.
Rules (aka answer to the puzzle)
You start from the topmost room. Reach the bottommost room.
In each room, there are two numbers; the cost (in gems) to enter the room and the number of gems inside the room, in that order. (For example, 4/2 means a cost of 4 gems to enter and you get 2 gems upon entering.)
Gems inside the room don’t regenerate; once you take them, they won’t appear again when you come again.
You can close (lock) a room and gain 50% refund. (For example, a room with a cost of 4 gems will refund you 2 gems when you lock it.) You can leave a room without locking it, if you wish.
A room can only be unlocked from the top, and upon locking a room, you must go to a higher room.
So… I’m bored. Here’s the result of my bored mind. I should return to making pencil puzzles…
Tapa Region Party Follow regular Tapa rules: Do Nurikabe-style. (The black cells are called the Tapa wall.) Cells with numbers may not be black. Numbers in a cell indicate the sizes of the black square groups adjacent to the clue square; two separate black square groups must be separated by at least one white square.
In addition, Region Party variation apples. The two quadrants with blue cells and “C” at the top-left of the cells indicate Clones quadrants: The contents of the two quadrants must be identical on the blue cells. (There is no restriction for cells inside the quadrants that are not blue.) The two quadrants with red cells and “E” at the top-right of the cells indicate Extra Region. After tilting the grid by 45 degrees, the blackened cells on the red squares also form a Tapa wall. (Note that all red squares form a single region, not two separate regions.)
Expected difficulty Hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published
Puzzle 71: Checkerboard Insanity
Tapa Region Party
Perhaps the only puzzle among the most recent 20 or so that is made purely on computer, not using my puzzle scratch book. The difficulty is hard; I wanted to go with medium but the variant is pretty confusing on itself.
Anyway. What inspired me? The recent TVCs and CTC on LMI, of course. Plus me recalling that I’ve done this crazy variant before. :3
And…uh…this variant is hard >_< The best finish I’ve found is unsatisfactory. But fair enough for a puzzle I make in half hour or so.
I need to make some easy puzzles for my “mate”… Ideas?
Greater Than Fillomino Follow regular Fillomino rules. In addition, inequality signs appear on the grid; these signs must be satisfied by the numbers in the squares involved.
Expected difficulty Hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published
Puzzle 70: Mii~ >w<
Greater Than Fillomino
(Here for plain version)
So, as a “natural” follow-up of my current interest on roleplaying, this is obligatory. All givens form either the emoticon ^^ or <3. I wanted to include =3 (equals sign and 3, effectively two horizontally adjacent 3’s) but if I can use only two emoticons why not. I didn’t want to figure out what happens with only one emoticon though, this by itself is already difficult to construct…
Hard, yeah. Because a few parts are hard. But if I’d use the average, this would be somewhere around medium, because the easy parts are easy. And the puzzle breaks down nicely into parts. *insert obligatory reference to vore*
So! This puzzle is a gift for an RP friend that is curious about puzzles. He solved Puzzle 1, a puzzle I believe to be “final test to see whether you advance from beginner to intermediate Fillomino solver”. Even though he clocked 2 hours, this is a fabulous achievement for someone with no prior experience of logic puzzles. And so I felt really guilty when testsolving the puzzle; I found the puzzle to have the mentioned hard steps. There are even parts where my best method is still trial and error to some extent (read: “what-if”s), but hey. Who cares about time. Let’s see whether the aforementioned RP friend can solve this :3
And finally, yeah. Mii~ >w<
So I planned an LMI test for early November. Turns out there’s a little hurdle that makes my test cannot be hosted on the weekend of my birthday, so I’m pushing it backward to February. x3
I haven’t planned the exact theme, but most probably simply an assortment of puzzles. Whether one puzzle/genre or two puzzles/genre is also unknown 😛
Sashikabe
Example puzzle and solution
Sashikabe Basically Sashigane and Nurikabe together. Shade some of the cells black so that the black cells form a Tapa wall (also known as a Nurikabe). The remaining white cells form several polyominoes each. Each polyomino must be of the shape of an L; formally, it is composed of an “elbow” of one square, with two “legs” of 1-cell width non-degenerate rectangles orthogonally adjacent to the elbow and are perpendicular to each other.
There are clues on the grid in form of arrows and circles; these squares must remain white. An arrow marks the end of some leg and shows the direction where the corresponding elbow is; for example, a left arrow means that a leg ends there and the elbow of that leg is located to the left of the square. A circle marks an elbow; a number inside a circle means that the polyomino containing that elbow has exactly that many squares.
Expected difficulty Hard • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published
Puzzle 69: Foxger’s Hybrid
Sashikabe
Yay, a puzzle! It’s rated hard solely because it’s a rather unusual genre.
So… What’s with the title? This genre is invented by Grant Fikes aka glmathgrant, and is pretty obviously a hybrid. In addition, Grant’s online persona (Grant Badger Fox) is also a hybrid (fox and badger), so you can call “Foxger [is] Hybrid”, using “hybrid” as an adjective. So, yeah, lame title. I can’t think of a better one though.
Also, as you can see, I attempted a perfectly symmetrical clue arrangement. Turns out I need to use a single circle there (luckily still preserving symmetry of layout, but not the contents), but I’m quite happy with the result as the solution itself is satisfying.
Why do I construct this? A request by mathgrant, of course! He made a Sashikabe puzzle and challenged me to make one too, so here it is. Turns out constructing these is a pain. Perhaps because I put the condition of making the clues perfectly symmetric, but hey, I tend to like perfect layouts.
Anyway. TVC XIV and CTC 2013 on Logic Masters India are going on! If you like Tapa, you should give both a try. The latter needs a consistent online schedule if you want to score high, but if you’re not into competitive stuff, you can still solve them for fun. They are pretty amazing puzzles. On the other hand, the former is part of TVC 2013, a 4-part contest of Tapa variations that has run since 2010. So yeah, two big events are running now.
On a more personal note. I’m currently in KAIST, as you should have known if you read this blog regularly (the latest post about my experience in KAIST has been up for about 4 days now). My Orientation Week has just ended, and seems like it’s not too busy…yet. The first academic week will start next Monday, so let’s see whether I still have time to construct puzzles or not…
Well, that’s all for now. Stay tuned!
EDIT 27 September 2013: Grant Fikes got his Sashikabe puzzle published! I’ve testsolved it and it’s a very nice puzzle. Also, this is one part of my thanks to Grant due to a certain personal problem that I prefer not to be shared with general public, but basically Grant helped me with my problem. A lot of help. Next part will come later. :3
Tapa Double Trouble Shade in some cells so the shaded cells form a Tapa wall. Cells containing clues (question marks) may not be shaded. A clue indicates the sizes of separate shaded cell groups among the 8 cells adjacent to it; for example, a clue of “1 2″ indicates that there are two groups of shaded cells, one of size 1 and one of size 2.
In addition, the “Tapa Double”[1] variant is in effect: every clue both provides the sizes of separate shaded cell groups as well as sizes of separate unshaded clues.
Further addition, all clues have been replaced with a question mark each.
Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published
Puzzle 68: Obvious Spinoff of Spinoff
Tapa Double Trouble
[1] In TVC XIV, this variant is called Tapa Clones, but I don’t want it to be misinterpreted with the Clones variant I made (where there are two or more marked regions that must contain exactly the same content), especially as I also used it for Puzzle 60.
Final puzzle before I’m going to (South) Korea. A future post will explain more about it.
Anyway. When I first saw Tapa Clones in TVC XIV, the fact that a very small amount of valid clues and the large amount of information each clue gives leads me to this variant. It comes pretty naturally for me; dunno whether other puzzle constructors, at the first sight of Tapa Clones, immediately think of this variant. But heh, why not.
I may or may not participate in TVC XIV. I need to settle in Korea first. Also even more unlikely is Classic Tapa Contest 2013 for quite obvious reasons. However, DTGT is plausible. Well I suppose I should focus on my studies first heh.
To the puzzle. It’s quite difficult to find an opening, and most of the tricks involve utilizing clue squares as known whites instead of…well…clue squares. But I’m still quite proud of this thing, which is made while half-sleepy…heh.
Neanderthal Tapa Shade in some cells so the shaded cells form a Tapa wall. Cells containing clues (1 or +) may not be shaded. A clue indicates the lengths of separate shaded cell groups among the 8 cells adjacent to it; for example, a clue of “1 2” indicates that there are two groups of shaded cells, one of size 1 and one of size 2. However, as neanderthals don’t know numbers greater than 1, all numbers greater than 1 are replaced by a plus sign (+) each. (So the above “1 2” clue will be replaced to “1 +”. A “1 5” clue is also replaced with “1 +”, and so it’s up to the solver to determine the exact number of a plus sign.)
Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want an answer/solution to be published
Puzzle 67: Too Many To Count
Neanderthal Tapa
(image seems broken; if it is, click to view full image)
Obligatory practice puzzle for TVC XIII. Well, you see this post, and you notice that number 2 is missing, so… Also yes, I most likely will participate.
Anyway. Neanderthal Tapa + antisymmetric seems too hard, so I just made a symmetric clue layout for this. A bit of unusual logic that may or may not exist in vanilla Tapa which pushes the difficulty to medium, but a pretty simple solve.
Fillomino Follow regular Fillomino rules.
Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Solution (196 kB)
Puzzle 66: Ring of Blocks
Fillomino
EDIT: Fixed ambiguity on top-right corner.
God how long has this blog been without puzzles vanilla Fillomino.
Well, yeah. I like Fillomino, but recent Fillomino puzzles I’ve published are all variants. Crazy variants, even. Here’s an attempt at making a vanilla Fillomino again. And yeah, now I’m using 16pt Century Gothic with 32px cell size. I’m not sure why I change the font so much; blame Will Shortz’s Puzzle Master Workout I think 😛
Speaking of crazy variants, remember Fancy Fillomino February? I’m going to do that again, only not on February, less puzzles, and crazier variants. Here’s a few genres of puzzles I’ve made, just as teasers: Operations, Liar Cipher, and Consecutive Rectangles. That’s not counting variants I made myself just for this series (not just reusing previous variants). Hyped up? See ya in end of October. Most likely the series will lead to my birthday.
Speaking of my birthday and puzzles. Remember Deception? Yes, I pretty likely will author another LMI test. I’m attempting for the test to be run on my birthday’s weekend; let’s see.
Chaos at the Sky 
