Minesweep under the rug
In these grids, some empty cells contain a single mine. A numerical clue indicates the number of mines in the eight adjacent cells. Stack all the grids on top of each other, and every cell stack will contain exactly one mine.
This is take two on writing a puzzle of this type, with a marked improvement in quality. Which is, in absolute terms, improvement from "abyssal" to "bad".
This is take two on writing a puzzle of this type, with a marked improvement in quality. Which is, in absolute terms, improvement from "abyssal" to "bad".
Whirlpool
Overly symmetric puzzles tend to be boring. Creek puzzles tend towards the easy. Consequently, this puzzle should suck.
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| Creek 1 "Whirlpool" |
Troll not
Regular readers of this blog, should such persons exist, may be excused for thinking the blog has turned into a convoluted trolling exercise, given the last couple of puzzles, which were unfairly, miserably hard. Hopefully, the masyu below starts to make up for those. It is of medium difficulty.
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| Masyu 9 "Make up" |
Descriptive Pairs Tile Sudoku
For once, the title is, well, descriptive. Every cell in the grid below contains a number between 1 to 9, inclusive. All numbers in the same row, or column, or bold outlined box are different. There are 16 rows, 16 columns and 9 boxes. Clues outside the grid take the form of a pair of numbers. For numbers i,j this means at least one of:
- the ith cell contains value j or
- the jth cell contains value i.
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| Desciptive Pairs Tile Sudoku |
Taking the piss
...out of people who woke up one fine morning to find out their company has been dissolved with absolutely no warning is now, apparently, a hobby of mine.
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| ert.gr screenshot |
Turkey troubles
Yesterday, Serkan Yurekli posted a
concise description of demonstrations and the harsh crackdown
unfolding in Turkey. This is a courageous act, given the continuing arrests of protest information disseminators, and the horrors which
threaten detained dissenters. Consider this post an expression of
solidarity, and a call for police brutality to cease.
You can get a detailed picture of
events and their direct drivers all over the web. I suggest Gawker (of all places) for a conversational overview, and this well-linked Ryan McCarthy piece as an introduction to current discussion. Acemoglu has a few big-picture pieces on Turkey written prior to the events which seem to be on point. Finally, this video covers the government perspective of events.
Unlucky Nuribou
Nuribous aren't all that common. Rarity of a puzzle type trips up difficulty rating. What the constructor considers a trite pattern is more often a journey of discovery for the solver. My first instinct was to rate this as barely a medium. On reflection, hard will best set the expectations of a novice solver. No, not rules post-level hard, but still...
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| Nuribou 6 "Unlucky" |
Stardust [Toroidal]
In addition to the usual rules, the grid is toroidal. That is to say, the top and bottom edges of the grid are connected the way they would if you bent the grid into a cylinder. So are the left and right edges. Or, for the fans of video games, think Pacman.
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| Stardust 3 [Toroidal] |
2V
I tend to go nuts when writing Hitori. This one is probably more accessible than the usual fare, though that isn't saying much.
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| Hitori 5 |
A small cryptographic fence
Draw a single closed line (the loop) on the yellow paths. The loop does not cross, overlap, or touch itself (no giggling back there) at a point. Letter clues exist inside the cells. Cells with the same letter have the same number of sides used by the loop. Cells with different letters have a different number of sides used by the loop. Yes, that number may be zero as well. Have, um, fun?
Easy Suraromu
And as usual, very susceptible to uniqueness. I almost chickened out of putting this one out. The design is so simple that it isn't entirely unlikely somebody else already wrote the exact same puzzle. Rules.
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| Suraromu 2 |
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