Deception Preview 7: Dock Chains

Battleships Yajilin Put the given fleet in the grid. Ships may be rotated, but not reflected. No two ships may be adjacent, and no ship may cover a number. Afterwards, draw a loop passing all cells that are not a ship segment or a number. The loop’s segments are parallel to the edges of the grid, turning only at cell centers. A number states the number of ship segments visible from the cell; that is, within the line of cells from the cell to the edge of the grid in the direction given in the clue.

Answer key: Enter the lengths of the horizontal/vertical line segments in the row/column respectively. Enter 0 if there is none.

Difficulty 3.5/10 • Target times 01:30 03:00 06:00 15:00
Solution Answer key (highlight →) 22,11 • PNG (not uploaded) • ZIP of PDF (not uploaded) • DOCX (not uploaded)

Deception Preview 7: Dock Chains
Battleships Yajilin

Seventh preview puzzle. Two more to go, and two days to Deception too.

You know, there are three Battleships Yajilin puzzles out there that I found by Google. Perhaps more but I’m too lazy to search further. Yet, all except the most recent (Grant’s in GMPuzzles) has a quirk (Prasanna’s has irregular fleet, Snyder’s has in-grid ships/seas) from what one can expect from a Battleships-Yajilin combo. So I decide to take a shot.

I’ll just give it away that at least one Battleships Yajilin in the test has irregular fleet. Had it turned worse than this, I’d post it as the preview instead. (Yes, my previews are mostly rejects.) Sadly it hadn’t, so it will appear in the test.

I’ll visit this genre in the future. I find it nice to toy with 😀 This, along with Liar Slitherlink and Skyscrapers Kropki, is fighting for the second most-satisfying-to-make genre (the first is obviously Cipher Fillomino because my bias towards Fillomino).

Puzzle 50: Sea of Ships

Retrograde Battlemats.

Follow similar Fillmats rules. Divide the grid into several rectangles, each of which must have 1-unit width and a height of between 1 and 4 units inclusive (or vice versa). No two rectangles with equal area may be orthogonally adjacent. A number gives the size of the rectangle it’s contained in. Differences from usual Fillmats rules: You can have multiple numbers in the same rectangle (like Fillomino), and four rectangles may meet at a point.

Afterwards, interpret the rectangles as usual Battleships ships, and solve the resulting Retrograde Battleships puzzle. Mark some of the ships black so the exact quantity of ships as shown in the fleet below are marked (aka for this puzzle, 1 battleship of 4-unit length, 2 cruisers of 3-unit length, 3 destroyers of 2-unit length, and 4 battleships of 1-unit length). No two ships may touch each other even orthogonally. Numbers outside the grid gives the number of ship segments in the corresponding row/column.

“Have you identified the ships Sky?”
“What? Are you expecting me to do this task really quickly? I even have no prior experience.”
“Just try.”
“Yeah, I’m trying if you can’t tell. Or actually…I think we can deduce all the ships from only this information.”
“Are you serious?”
“Hopefully so. Just try; if you miss something, I’ll try to identify something that will help. But see, this is more efficient with not that much cost to identify everything…”
“Yeah yeah I know, Sky the Puzzle Master. Okay, let me solve this.”
“Also, seeing from the information, if it’s unique then it should be medium, but let’s see…”

Puzzle 50: Sea of Ships
Retrograde Battlemats

Yay 50 puzzles! New hybrid.

This is mostly a proof of concept. I’m posting a lot of those. However, I do see quite neat interactions possible; I actually put in one of those here.

Yes, I forgot a few of Fillmats rules because I rarely see them. Heck, the correct name is actually Fillmat, but let’s use the “s” for “my” “variation”. Blargh.

Anyway, Puzzle 51 has also been planned, and if I schedule correctly, it should show up in about 21.5 hours aka midnight PST.