Thursday, February 27, 2025

Genre Spotlight 16: Sea Serpent (Puzzles 249 and 250)

Sea Serpent is one of many snake genres, which can be a sticking point for many solvers.  (It's me, I'm many solvers.)  I don't actually know too much about the history of this type; I was able to find it in a 2003 24HPC round but am not sure if this is actually where the genre originates.  There are definitely aspects of this type which can be annoying, but overall I think it's friendlier than normal Snake.  Sea Serpent doesn't have a "no diagonal adjacency" rule, and it's possible to place clues which behave more locally.

Rules: Shade some cells to form a non-intersecting path which does not touch itself orthogonally. Circles mark the ends of the path. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the total number of shaded cells that appear in the indicated directions.

(Example taken from WPC 2011.  Here the snake is represented by a path rather than by a group of shaded cells.) 


I did say that Sea Serpent is generally friendlier than snake, but that doesn't mean these puzzles are easy.  In particular, one of my aims with these puzzles was to avoid fully maximal clues; this increased the difficulty quite a bit.  That said, 249 is overall easier than 250.

Puzzle 249 (Penpa)

Puzzle 250 (Penpa) (Edit 11:40 AM: I had uploaded a draft of this puzzle on accident, which had multiple solutions.  Fixed.)

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