Monday, May 19, 2025

Genre Spotlight 35: Fishermen (Puzzles 328 and 329)

Next up is an old Anglers variation called Fishermen.  Like Hanami, Fishermen is from a 24HPC round (2012, Matej Uher), though I don't know if that is the original source of the genre.

Rules: Place boats (rectangles of size 1x2 cells) in the grid so that no two boats touch each other, not even diagonally.  Each boat contains exactly one number which represents a fisherman.  Draw a line from each fisherman to a different fish whose length is indicated by the fisherman's number.  Lines cannot cross boats, nor can they cross or overlap each other.  Every cell in the grid is occupied by a fish, a boat segment, or a line.

         

Astute readers may notice that I removed the outside clues from this ruleset (counting the number of boat segments in the corresponding row or column).  The rules were constrained enough that these outside clues felt unnecessary.  Indeed, the original example puzzle was almost unique without them!  Key word "almost".  There is one quite annoying deadly pattern that I encountered multiple times while constructing, and I suspect the outside clues were added to account for that.  (Pop quiz: what do you think this deadly pattern is?)

Here are the puzzles; as usual, I aimed for symmetry in a genre where there are rarely ever expectations for symmetry, oops.  The second one is tricky to break in to but should be smooth afterward.

Puzzle 328 (Penpa)

Puzzle 329 (Penpa) (EDIT 2:15 PM: fixed a multiple solutions goof, thanks Menderbug for catching.)

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