Happy New Year everyone! For 2025, I aim to revive this space and post puzzles on a more regular schedule.
I've wanted to explore more niche types for a while, but felt like I never had the opportunity to do so. The 2024 PuzzleSquare Advent Calendar last month allowed me to construct puzzles in genres I wasn't familiar with, and I found this to be more fun than expected (although there were definitely types that didn't vibe with me, which isn't surprising given my stubbornness sometimes). I've also felt, as of late, that much of my solving lately has been heavily skewed toward the types that are popular within my immediate circles, so even genres with medium popularity get ignored. (When was the last time I solved an Araf?)
Thus, my goal is to break out of this habit and explore types that seem interesting and are relatively obscure. Every Monday and Thursday at 9AM Central Time, I'll post two puzzles in a new genre that I find interesting. The first puzzle is intended to be relatively approachable, while the second will be ... maybe hard, maybe easy, maybe not. It'll be a surprise! In any case, I hope to highlight some cool rulesets to play around with. Some of these I think have true potential to be evergreens, while others may be one-offs that I still find cute. Come join me!
Before we start, one disclaimer: the exact definition of "obscure" won't be consistent from day to day. Some types will be somewhat familiar with my Discord folks (hi!) but maybe less known elsewhere. Others may have a few puzzles on Kudamono already, such as today's. There will also be several genres previously covered by GAPP, a project in the Cracking the Cryptic server that's been chugging along for three years at this point. There may also be types that were common ten or twenty years ago but may not be so popular nowadays! (Remember, I'm a pandemic-era puzzler!) All this is to say that solvers sufficiently familiar with the logic puzzle iceberg may already know many types. But I hope that at least one type will be new over the course of the year.
With that out of the way, let's start 2025 with a quirky type: Timber!. (Yes, the title has an exclamation point.)
Timber! is a type originally introduced by Erich Friedman on his personal site, Puzzle Palace. (That said, this type is a bit difficult to find -- props if you can reach it!). This genre has a feel that I haven't seen elsewhere, because it's specifically all about uniqueness.
Rules (adapted from Puzzle Palace). Cut down each tree in the forest, making it fall one unit in a horizontal or vertical direction into a vacant square. Your goal is to leave a unique path between circles that moves horizontally and vertically, does not visit any square more than once, and avoids fallen trees and tree stumps.
Now for the puzzles. It's somewhat tricky to make an easy puzzle in this type, so the first grid has some subtleties, but overall it introduces some of the important heuristics when solving. The second one is a bit tricky -- it's possible to solve logically, but a bit annoying. Intuition will probably make it more fun to solve. (The original version of this puzzle was very non-unique -- thanks IHNN and Seren for catching this!)
No comments:
Post a Comment