Sunday, December 21, 2025

Puzzle 361 (Sus-Shikaku)

This puzzle is a Sus-Shikaku, a variant invented (?) by Prasanna Seshadri for last year's Puzzle Ramayan contest.  Apparently, this clue pattern was quite similar to one of the grids on the actual contest.  Regardless, this one is pretty tough.

Rules: Standard Shikaku rules, with a twist.  Divide the grid into regions so that each region contains one circle.  Regions containing black circles are still rectangular, but regions containing white circles are not rectangular.  Numbers still indicate the area of the region contained in the clue. 

Puzzle 361 (Penpa)

 

Friday, December 19, 2025

Puzzle 360 (Yajilin)

The next few posts on here will be reposts of various puzsq puzzles I've written this year.  I didn't want these posts to "dilute" the Spotlight (whatever that means), but now that the Spotlight is over, there's no reason not to cross-post them here.

First up, a Yajilin from way back in January.  At the time, I was messing with Cross+A generation, and wanted to see if it was possible to construct a symmetric Yajilin faster than Cross+A could.  The answer was "yes", although cspuz ended up being really helpful with the ending.  I'm super happy with how this one turned out.

Online interface (puzz.link)

 

Monday, December 8, 2025

Genre Spotlight 70: Trapezoids (Puzzles 358 and 359)

For our last spotlight (at least on a regular basis), I spent a long time thinking about what genre to do before realizing that we hadn't had a non-square grid yet.  (Tawamurenga doesn't count.)  Here's my opportunity to fix that!  This genre is Trapezoids, originally invented by Dan Adams in 2016.  It's a genre that only works on triangular grids, using that geometry in an interesting way.

Rules. Shade some cells black.  Shaded cells must be in clusters of three, forming trapezoids.  Trapezoids may not touch orthogonally.  All the unshaded cells must form a single connected group.  Each number indicates the number of shaded cells in the (up to six) cells surrounding the clue.

            

Small note: Dan's original puzzles don't seem to have any clues along the border of the grid.  I found border clues easier to work with, so added them into my constructions. 

Monday, December 1, 2025

Genre Spotlight 69: Key West (Puzzles 356 and 357)

Only two more left!  Not sure what I'll do for the last one; probably nothing special, to be honest.  Also, if you're thinking "wait, wasn't dj close to 400 puzzles before?", I realized yesterday that the numbering has been wildly off since May!  Whoops.

For today's genre, we've got a type that is hot off the pzprxs presses!  This type is Key West, first appearing way back in Puzzle Communication Nikoli 53.  Upon reading the rules, your first impression may be "wow this is very similar to Sukoro".  Indeed, the two genres share many common structures.  But the ruleset here is different enough to provide an alternate feel.

Rules: Place a number between 0 and 4 in every island, and draw orthogonal bridges connecting them. Orthogonally adjacent islands cannot have the same number. Numbers indicate how many bridges are connected to this island. All islands with a number above 0 must be connected into a single network.