Today's puzzle seems to be an somewhat recent Nikoli type, debuting in issue 166. I'm unable to find any instances of this puzzle online, other than listings on Cross+A and janko.at, and one grid in the GAPP series. It's a neat type, combining region division with Minesweeper-style clues. (Though these only count orthogonally adjacent cells rather than diagonally adjacent ones, so maybe they're actually Koburin-style clues? Shrug.)
Rules. Divide the grid into regions of orthogonally connected cells. Each region must contain exactly one circle. A number in a circle indicates how many cells are in the region the circle belongs to. A black cell is not part of any region, and indicates how many different regions it’s orthogonally adjacent to.
I'm using the Nikoli example grids here, which are lower-quality images but showcase the fact that the genre was originally constructed with cat symbols instead of circles. Everyone must know this vitally important information.
Two easier/smaller puzzles today, because my PhD thesis is more important right now. This first puzzle aims to exploit an incorrect logical step I made several times when originally solving these.
The second puzzle showcases some more subtle interactions formed by the black number clues.
There are two listings for this genre on puzsquare (using cats!!) :
ReplyDeletehttps://puzsq.logicpuzzle.app/?kind=941 and https://puzsq.logicpuzzle.app/?kind=650 It looks like one variant doesn't make use of numbers in cats.
Oh wow, thanks! I'm not surprised I wasn't able to find this on puzsq :)
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