Puzzle 151 ("Pinwheel", Tapa-Like Loop)

It's my birthday today!  Can you guess how old I am now?

This puzzle was annoying to construct, surprisingly.  I ended up using noq a lot for testing, since many of my grids would only touch three of the four quadrants.  (The center clues are quite powerful.)  Once I came up with something that had a unique solution, though, I realized I completely changed the dynamic of the puzzle.  Is it better?  No clue.

I found an interesting deduction in Tapa-Like Loop when constructing this.  I'm not sure if this puzzle requires it, but it certainly makes your life much easier if you find it.

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Puzzle 150 ("Tilted Square", Tetra Chain)

It's been a while since we've had this theme. 😉

This genre recently appeared in Puzzle Communication Nikoli Issue 181.  I like it!  It feels like a fusion of LITS, Yajilin, and (to a lesser extent) Chained Block.  Diagonal adjacency genres are pretty cool (and, funnily enough, Nikoli calls this type of ruleset a fad!).  Be warned, though, this is not the most gentle introduction to the type.

(Also: Nikoli calls this Tetra Chain Y, because another puzzle in that issue has the same tetromino adjacency rules.  I don't like the Y there, so I removed it.  This name is tentative, though.)

Rules: Shade some cells in the grid to form tetrominos which do not share an edge.  Clue cells cannot be shaded and indicate the number of shaded cells in the direction of the arrow up to the border of the grid.  Identical tetrominos cannot touch at a corner, and all tetrominos must be connected diagonally (i.e. by corners).

Online interface (Penpa)

Puzzle 149 (Akari)

Hi!  Have another Akari puzzle; it's been a while since I last posted one here.  Not much else to say about it.

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Puzzle 148 ("Two Halves", Midloop)

Another Midloop puzzle with a clones theme.  This is actually pretty close to being a full "Four Quarters" theme, but the dots in row 10 don't work when placed in row 5.  The solve is better without dots in row 5, anyway.

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PANFOPCHWTTAPA 3 Unused Puzzles

Our beginner friendly contest PANFOPCWHTTAPA 3 just concluded!  If you haven't tried the puzzles yet, feel free to give them a go!  As a fun bonus, I figured I would share some extra puzzles I wrote that didn't quite make the cut for various reasons.  Some of these were too hard for their positions, while others just didn't fit.

Puzzle 147 ("Medium Nikoli" Series, Slitherlink)

Again skipping Dotchi Loop because I'm not in the mood.

Constructing this Slitherlink puzzle was way more difficult than I expected.  There were a few factors making this happen, I think:

• The Nikoli slitherlinks in Pencil Puzzle 2022 are 15x25, not 10x18 like I originally thought.  This made the process way longer to complete.
• Compared to the other genres in this series, Slitherlink requires an exceptionally large number of choices to make when constructing.  I found myself wanting to strike a balance between difficulty and smoothness, and so I had to choose my givens very carefully.
• There were some parts in the middle that I wanted to make sufficiently important; one of these, in particular, took a long time to construct.
• I had to resist the temptation to use more subtle logic most of the time.  In particular, I actually needed to scrap a good chunk of the first half because I realized it was too difficult!

Not sure when I'll be constructing a puzzle of this size again.  In the meantime, enjoy.  Difficulty tows the line between "Hard" and "Extra", I think.

(Edit: Fixed to make one part of the puzzle smoother.)

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Puzzle 146 ("Radiant Center", Numberlink)

And one more.  I'm quite pleased with this construction 😀

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