Sunday, August 31, 2025

Genre Spotlight 56: Point Plate (Puzzles 370 and 371)

We haven't had many region division genres in the Spotlight!  Today's type is Point Plate, an Omopa genre from issue 185 of Puzzle Communication Nikoli. (Actually, this is a slight lie; the original puzzle type was numberless, but multiple readers added number clues for puzzles in issue 186.) It has several rules that are sometimes hard to remember (and maybe a bit awkward in places), but the resulting puzzles have some interesting dynamics.

Rules: Draw lines over the dotted lines to divide the grid into regions. Regions cannot be square or rectangular in shape.  There can't be a 2x2 square of cells that are all part of the same region.

A number indicates the size of the region that contains it. A region can contain no more than one number.  A dot indicates a vertex where exactly 3 lines meet (there may be four-way intersections or three-way intersections without a dot). All lines must divide two different regions.

          

(Example by Rook)

As usual, two puzzles in store.  The first one is a bit silly.

 

The second one was made first.  Usually, when trying to feel out a genre, I will force clue symmetry to sense what kind of logic is possible.  This restriction ended up being a massive pain in this type, especially with the dots.

 
 

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