For the first time this series, I'm writing this post after the previous one has released 😧. Turns out that writing a thesis saps your energy toward other things, who would have guessed? Fortunately, the dissertation is now done, apart from some administrative minutia and, well, defending the thing. My current plan is to run through a few Inaba genres for now to clear out some of the backlog.
Today's genre is Long Ring.
Rules: Draw a loop along the grid edges. Numbers indicate the length of the line the circle is on.
Yep, that's the entire ruleset. Classic Inaba, eh?
When constructing these, I was unsure about whether this clue type would work better with a "full loop" constraint. My gut feeling was that, by itself, these circle clues wouldn't be enough to really constrain much. Instead of choosing one or the other, I decided to construct one puzzle in both styles and let readers decide which one is better.
The first puzzle is "vanilla", with ruleset exactly as stated above. The second puzzle is a "full" variant, where the loop must pass through all grid vertices. Both puzzles are of similar difficulty, though the second one will probably feel easier to those who are more experienced with full loop puzzles.
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