Our second genre is Territory! This one is slightly more well known than Timber!, but only to a small group of people. Regardless, there hasn't been a new one posted in a few months, so I'd still consider this obscure enough🙂.
Territory is an old type originally invented by Naoki Inaba. Inaba is known for inventing hundreds of genres (over 400 in Puzzle Laboratory!). Some of his types have gone on to become classics -- most notably LITS, Aquarium, Dominion, and Maxi Loop -- but every now and then a forgotten genre pops out of the woodwork and experiences a resurgence. (Guide Arrow is one such type; while the genre lost a bit of its stride due to overexposure, it's still a great type that has lots of cool interactions.)
Territory is the most recent example of this, mainly due to the puzz.link implementation released in late April last year. The clue description seems too unorthodox to work at first glance, but it ends up being very good, especially as a dynasty genre. I'm not sure if Territory will ever become an evergreen, but I'd like to see it gain wider exposure.
Rules: Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are orthogonally adjacent and the remaining unshaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Cells containing circles must be unshaded. If a circle contains a number, that number represents the area of the largest unshaded rectangle containing the clue.
Now for the puzzles. The first one is six months old (I published it to PuzzleSquareJP in June) but I'm still surprised it just works. The second one is new and demonstrates some more subtle interactions with the clues.
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