meander lawn: Whirlpool

Overly symmetric puzzles tend to be boring. Creek puzzles tend towards the easy. Consequently, this puzzle should suck.

Creek 1 "Whirlpool"

Joshua Zucker said...: I've hardly solved any creek puzzles - I think I did two once, on some old Indian puzzle championship test perhaps -- so I didn't find this particularly easy. The symmetry definitely helped me re-use a bunch of the logic. I wish the online player had some way of noting "the path can't squeeze through this general area" to help me keep track of where the connectivity had to go. It was definitely a nice global puzzle in that sense! Felt almost like a Tapa sometimes.; 5 July 2013 at 18:08:00 EEST
Δόλιχος said...: The "tend towards the easy" was a general statement on the type, mostly as setup for the lame pun. The only thing one can do with Creek is toy with connectivity, which is why Tapa came to mind perhaps.

This puzzle becomes a bit easier if you start at the right place. Usually, that's close to the symmetry break. But since this break evidently makes connections easier, starting as far from it as possible is more rewarding.

Cell border markings would be nice, but pzv's value proposition for the author is hard to beat. In any case, the alternative (Otto Janko's wonderful applets) is currently in a state of flux. Of course, if anybody's feeling like contributing or forking pzv, http://code.google.com/p/pzprv3 is where it's at.; 6 July 2013 at 19:41:00 EEST

meander lawn