Monday, 11 April 2022

Freddie Hand

The Candy Crush GAPP had a remarkably confusing ruleset, which may have thrown some solvers for a loop. It certainly did that to our setters, with two loopy puzzles from Tyrgannus and jovi_al, a pathy puzzle from Eric (loopy if you consider all stars to be connected to their clues in the third dimension), and a puzzle from shye where you had to avoid making loops. Thankfully, this shading genre Kurochute should restore some normality.

...Or is it a region division genre, because of the dynasty (no shaded touch, unshaded connected) rule? Thankfully this constraint isn't actually required to solve the puzzle (although of course you are welcome to use it). Phew!

Rules: Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are orthogonally adjacent and the remaining unshaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and mean that there must exist exactly one shaded cell with the indicated distance in a straight line vertically or horizontally from the clue.

Solving Notes
- The words "exactly one" are very important here!
- In the puzz.link interface, you can click on a clue to grey it, to represent that the clue has been fully exhausted.

Example (puzzlink): https://tinyurl.com/mw2asrkx

Acquire a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 2:15 or less!
Obtain a Quick Crab 🦀 by solving the puzzle in 5:00 or less!
And all solvers who complete the puzzle will be rewarded with a Chutey Chukar Partridge 🐦

Puzzle (puzzlink): https://tinyurl.com/2p98kdvb