Saturday, 15 July 2023

Menderbug

Walkthrough for yesterday's Context: https://youtu.be/hJMpL2cD15Y

It's Supersized Saturday and a great excuse to revisit a classic: Country Road. In fact, I can't believe that this wonderful genre has only been featured once on GAPP, more than a year ago! Check out Eric's take on it if you want a smaller puzzle to warm up: Archive: Thursday, 10 March 2022 And since it's been so long, you'll get not one, but two GAPP 101s today!

Rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells which passes through each region exactly once. A number in a region represents how many cells in the region are visited by the loop. Orthogonally adjacent cells across a region border may not both be unused.

GAPP 101: Each region getting exactly one visit is a powerful constraint. It means if a region has two entrances, there can't be any others, and those two segments will be directly connected. Make sure not to close the loop early! In particular, two adjacent regions can have at most one exit connecting them.
GAPP 102: There's a little bit of progress to be made with each of the four clued regions in the corners right at the start, but the 3 is a bit subtler than the others. You can determine where the loop must enter and exit this region right away.

Score a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 7:00 or less!
Collect a Quick Crab 🦀 by completing the puzzle in 12:00 or less!
Finish the puzzle in your own time to become the proud owner of a Country Broadbill 🐦!

Example (puzz.link): https://tinyurl.com/5n95fcnm
Puzzle (puzz.link, Landscape): https://tinyurl.com/2s43ewvs
Puzzle (puzz.link, Portrait): https://tinyurl.com/4wt3buzb