Monday, September 22, 2025

Genre Spotlight 59: Circles and Squares (Puzzles 376 and 377)

Today's genre is Circles and Squares, a recent-ish shading genre developed by Discord user Anonymus25.  It's a good example of a numberless genre that manages to do some really interesting things.

Rules: Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area and each orthogonally connected area of unshaded cells is in the shape of a square. Cells with black circles must be shaded, and cells with white circles must not be shaded. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.

          

Two puzzles today.  The first one has a silly theme and a (mostly?) smooth solve.  It took a few tries to get a theme that worked well with these clues -- they often want to be closer than I think they do!

Puzzle 376 (pzprxs)

As for the second one, I decided to ignore any sense of visual theme and just plop clues down as I went.  Then the grid got bigger.  Then it got bigger again.  Oops.  Thanks to mya for checking uniqueness and helping me remove a few clues after the first draft.

Puzzle 377 (pzprxs) 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment