Genre Spotlight 14: Mine Shaft (Puzzles 245 and 246)

Mine Shaft was a genre localized on Puzzle Picnic back when the site was still live.  I can't seem to find it anywhere else, though I wouldn't be surprised if it's appeared multiple times and I never realized.  Mine Shaft is really a Snake variant of sorts; IMO "Hydra" would be an appropriate name for it.  I actually think it's superior to Snake in some ways.  While the less-restrictive structure of the solution means you generally need more clues to make puzzles unique, it also allows for more localized progress in areas, and I think there's more you can do with it overall.

Rules: Shade some cells in the grid to form a "mine shaft" -- that is, an orthogonally connected group of cells which contains no loops (not even 2×2s) and does not touch itself diagonally.  Given circles indicate all cells which are adjacent to exactly one other shaded cell.  Numbers above and next to the grid indicate the number of shaded cells in the corresponding row or column.

       

Genre Spotlight 13: Tile City (Puzzles 243 and 244)

I'm capitalizing on this one during its puzz.link implementation honeymoon phase.  (Feel free to deduce the length of my backlog from this information.)

Tile City was introduced by PuzzleSquareJP user _AtomicNeoN_ way back in February 2022.  It seems to have been quickly relegated to obscurity, as there are very few puzzles after the initial batch.  That said, the recent online interface has resulted in a small resurgence of the type.  It's a neat ruleset!  It combines a familiar "no 2x2" rule with interesting logical steps that result in a unique feel.  (In particular, there's a 4-star on PuzzleSquareJP that I tried but couldn't break into....)

Rules: Shade some cells such that each region is either fully shaded or fully unshaded. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Each group of orthogonally connected unshaded regions must contain exactly one region of each size, from a region with only one cell up to the largest region in the group. Regions containing numbers must be unshaded, and the number represents the size of the largest region in its group.