Puzzle 143 ("Medium Nikoli" series, Heyawake)

Next up in this Nikoli series is Heyawake, a puzzle genre with more than its fair share of puzzles on the internet.  (Technically, Dotchi Loop should have been next, but I'm not quite in the mood to construct a large puzzle in that genre right now.)

Unlike all the other genres covered thus far, I had no expectations of region symmetry when making this puzzle; symmetry felt like an active hindrance that would do more harm than good.  That being said, I still stuck to a certain visual theme during the construction.  (Can you guess what theme?)

Despite Heyawake being one of my weaker genres, this puzzle was pretty fun to construct.  I think it helped that most of the tweaking afterward involved polishing the last quarter of the puzzle, which I wasn't happy with at first.  

Difficulty "Hard", I think.

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Puzzle 142 ("Staircase", Ring-Ring)

This is the first Ring-Ring puzzle on this blog.  It's also not your typical example of the puzzle, I think.  A bit more "theory" heavy than my usual, but you don't need to prove anything fancy.

Rules: Draw rectangular loops through the centers of empty cells so that every empty cell gets used.  The sides of different rectangles may intersect each other, but may not turn at their intersection or otherwise overlap.

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Puzzle 141 (Double Choco)

Oh no, I'm on a Double Choco kick it seems!  This one was much less painful than #139 to make and is an even tighter construction, so I think the effort is starting to pay off.  Or I got lucky.  We'll never know.

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Puzzle 140 ("Medium Nikoli" series, Chained Block)

Back at it again with the Nikoli series!  This time we tackle Chained Block.  Frequent readers of this blog will recall that this is not my first rodeo with this genre.

This puzzle is not as smooth as some of my others -- there are one or two places where a tiny amount of lookahead is required, I think.  However, I'm still putting it in this series because of its use of question mark clues, which denote blocks of unknown size.  Most non-Nikoli sources don't use question mark clues to their full extent, so I wanted to make something interesting happen with them in this puzzle.  This is the result.

Difficulty "Extra", and it's not even close.

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