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.