This may seem like a new variation from the title, but it's not really that new. The main focus/inspiration of this post is actually Minesweeper (Pentomino), a somewhat rare but very cool riff on Pentomino placing puzzles. That said, there's no reason the ruleset has to restrict the puzzle to just pentominos; in theory, any bank of shapes could do, right?
Rules: Place the given shapes into the grid, rotations and reflections allowed. Shapes cannot cover the numbered cells, and different shapes cannot be placed in adjacent cells that share an edge or corner. Numbered cells indicate how many of the surrounding cells (including diagonally adjacent cells) contain parts of the shapes.
You may have been led to believe that there will be a pentomino bank puzzle here. But alas, you have been fooled! Instead, I decided to see what would happen with two other shape banks: Single Tetromino and Double Tetromino. The results were interesting.
The single tetromino puzzle is on a 7x7 grid, but in general that grid size is too small to accommodate the no-touching adjacency rule. This grid only worked because I found a solution and filled in the number clues later.
Conversely, the double tetromino is on an 11x11 grid, one unit larger than the standard Statue Park size. I found that 11x11 was fairly big for a double tetromino set. That might have to do the size of the board; the tetromino squares take up 40/121 ~ 33% of the grid, compared to pentominos covering 60/169 ~ 35.5%. It may also have to do with the fact that the tetrominos allow for repeats and are also better behaved than pentominos. I'm not sure.
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