Last night in the Puzzler's Club discord, Will Cadegan-Schlieper casually mentioned the idea of a "CTS-like Loop" genre -- that is, Cross the Streams style clues being used to draw a loop instead of shading squares like a nonogram. (In essence, this is analogous to the difference between Tapa and Tapa-like Loop.) I immediately jumped on to the idea and created these two puzzles. The first one was a testing ground on a small grid, while the second one was the "main" puzzle I wanted to create. Both turned out quite well, and while I'm not sure "Cross the Loop" is a sustainable genre (uniqueness is tricky without a lot of clue packing), I do like the puzzles I've created and think they're worth sharing 🙂.
Rules. Draw a single closed loop (without intersections or crossings) passing through some empty cells in the grid. Numbers to the left/top of the grid represent the lengths of all loop segments which are in that row/column in order, either from left to right or from top to bottom. A question mark (?) represents a loop segment whose size is unknown (but greater than zero); an asterisk (*) represents any number of unknown groups of black cells, including none at all. Segments perpendicular to the row/column are considered segments of length zero and are not tallied in the row and column clues.
Lonely Two (online interface)
Twos and Threes (online interface)
