Friday, 4 March 2022

Freddie Hand

I have recently developed a concerning number allergy (two days ago, to be precise), which, with being in a sudoku server, has made life rather difficult. (At least GAPP has avoided these dreaded figures thus far!) I had made this Tapa a week ago, but now I can't bear to look at it without blanking out all the numbers. Will you still able to solve this Tapa (Unknowns) when I hide this information from you?

Rules: Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.

Variant: Some clues may contain question marks ('?'). Each of these represents a positive integer (i.e. a number greater than 0).

NB: There is some debate about whether a lone question mark (i.e a cell containing a single '?' and no numbers) can be 0 or not (the answer is should be no, but puzz.link and some other places disagree, so I have to mention the alternative ruleset too). This minor quibble does not matter for this puzzle.

Example (puzzlink): https://tinyurl.com/45598p97

Acquire a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 1:45 or less!
Obtain a Quick Crab 🦀 by solving the puzzle in 4:15 or less!
And all solvers who complete the puzzle will be rewarded with a Topological Tapaculo 🐦

(Pop quiz: how many times has this bird frequented the GAPP series now?)

Puzzle (puzzlink): https://tinyurl.com/mu54j4dh