Puzzle 77: Boxes

Nanro Put a number into some cells on the grid. All cells with numbers must be connected, but no 2×2 square may consist of all numbers. In each bold region, all numbers must be equal; there must be an equal number of numbers in the bold region as the number written on it. Two equal numbers in different regions may not be orthogonally adjacent.

Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 77: Boxes
Nanro

A terrible first attempt at constructing Nanro puzzles…

Puzzle 76: Themeless Hidato

Hidato Put a number between 1 and 100 inclusive such that two consecutive numbers are adjacent (orthogonally or diagonally).

Expected difficulty Medium • Answer • Comment/E-mail if you want a solution to be published

Puzzle 76: Themeless Hidato
Hidato

This one has been laying in my archive for I forgot how long. Instead of having a long absence of puzzles, let’s throw this out. I was planning to use it on a test, but considering now I use exclusively new variants, I think it won’t do any good into the test.

Also, as you can see, I’m figuring out how to make a good tooltip thingy. (See the dotted 100 above? If you use a desktop computer, you can hover your cursor above it. If you can’t (on mobile phone? or something), then don’t worry, it’s not that important, only that you’re missing “why 100?”.)

Anyway, back to making puzzles. I need to make more to avoid leaving the blog dead…

Puzzle 72: Drunk Man

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…

Puzzle 68: Obvious Spinoff of Spinoff

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.

Puzzle 66: Ring of Blocks

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.

Puzzle 64: Sunken Treasure

Battleships Put the given fleet to the grid so that no two ships are adjacent. Ships may be rotated, but not reflected. Ships may not be placed on blue squares (seas), and if there is a ship segment in the grid, it must be occupied by the exact same segment (same shape and orientation).

Difficulty 4.5/10 • Target times 01:00 02:30 07:30 20:00
Solution PNG (not uploaded) • PDF (not uploaded)

Puzzle 64: Sunken Treasure
Battleships

E-mail me the treasure (4-letter word) to get a free puzzle request (of reasonable size, aka 10×10 for the usual genres that I post). Don’t spam me. Only 5 requests offered.

Hint: There are two words, or to be precise two 4-character strings. One is supposed to be a check whether you are in the right track (if you find it and it makes sense, you’re in the right track; the treasure is the other one).

Meanwhile, this might probably be the last puzzle for a while, while I’m going to fix all previous puzzle posts to follow the current template.

EDITS:

Hint 1: You don’t need to solve the puzzle in order to find the treasure.

Deception Preview 9: Lines of Circles

Skyscrapers Kropki Put a number between 1-6 inclusive in the grid (the black-bordered square) so that each number appears exactly once in every row/column. Afterwards, interpreting the numbers as heights of buildings, put a number in each cell outside the grid (observer) that tells the number of visible buildings from that position looking into the grid. Taller buildings block shorter ones. For example, if a row has 25341 in that order, an observer from the left will see two buildings (2,5) and from the right will see three buildings (1,4,5).

In addition, if there is a black circle between two cells, one of the numbers in those cells must be exactly twice the other. If there is a white circle between two cells, the two numbers in those cells must differ by one. (There can be either circle between 1 and 2.) The absence of circles doesn’t imply anything.

Answer key: Enter the unit digits (last digits) of the numbers in the cells in the row/column. Only enter the buildings, not the observers.

Difficulty 4.0/10 • Target times 02:00 04:00 07:00 20:00
Solution Answer key (highlight →) 563124,362154 • PNG (not uploaded) • ZIP of PDF (not uploaded) • DOCX (not uploaded)

Deception Preview 9: Lines of Circles
Skyscrapers Kropki

Ninth preview puzzle. That ends the Deception preview series. Reminding you that the link is here, and it will start in approximately 31 hours. Good luck!

…yes. This puzzle is posted out of schedule. There’s a long story, but basically Prasanna Seshadri is also going to testsolve this. Or solve this, since it’s official. I don’t know. Whatever. But he wanted the last preview puzzle, and I’m on bed already (yes, this paragraph is hot from the stove), and I don’t have the copy on my phone. So, yeah. Sorry if you find the broken schedule annoying. But earlier never hurts, does it?

About this puzzle itself, it’s supposed to make the shape of P. Or not, I don’t know. I totally forget whether this is intentional or accidental. I toyed with the possibility of lined circles, and this is what happens.

Deception Preview 8: Counting The Naturals

Domino Nurikabe Shade some cells black so the black cells form a tapa wall. No cell with a number may be shaded black. The black cells divide the white cells to several polyominoes (islands), all maximal (cannot be extended). Each island must have exactly one number that tells the size of the island. In addition, it must be possible to partition the black cells to dominoes. Such partition need not be unique, as long as there exists at lest one.

Answer key: Enter the lengths of the lines of black cells in the marked row/column. If the row/column has all/no black cells, enter 0.

Difficulty 3.5/10 • Target times 01:00 02:30 04:00 10:00
Solution Answer key (highlight →) 311,41 • PNG (not uploaded) • ZIP of PDF (not uploaded) • DOCX (not uploaded)

Deception Preview 8: Counting The Naturals
Domino Nurikabe

Eighth preview puzzle. Try solving the puzzle with 18 changed to a question mark (indicating an unknown number). Otherwise, not much gimmick. Figuring out the top-right part is a little tricky though.

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).

Deception Preview 5: Jumping Borders

Elimination Tapa Shade some cells black so the black cells form a tapa wall. No cell with a number or question mark may be shaded black. A cell containing a number tells the lengths of consecutive black cells adjacent to it; if there are multiple numbers, they must be separated (there must be at least one white square separating them). Question mark represents an unknown number. In addition, every cell with a number/question mark needs exactly one number/question mark removed before the actual set of numbers is obtained.

Answer key: Enter the lengths of the lines of black cells in the marked row/column. If the row/column has all/no black cells, enter 0.

Difficulty 3.5/10 • Target times 01:30 03:00 08:00 20:00
Solution Answer key (highlight →) 71,32 • PNG (not uploaded) • ZIP of PDF (not uploaded) • DOCX (not uploaded)

Deception Preview 5: Jumping Borders
Elimination Tapa

Fifth preview puzzle.

If you don’t get the title, note that the clues on the first row are at column , , , and . Similarly for first column. Last row and last column are just rotational symmetry.