Sunday, 29 October 2023

Freddie Hand

Today's snack is a perfectly standard-shaped logic puzzle genre on a grid of perfectly square cells, on a perfectly ordinary day, with a perfectly normal name of Tawamurenga aka Tawa, described by a perfectly average-length sentence, with a perfectly expected way to drive this joke so deep into the ground that it ended up near New Zealand. After all, my colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

Rules: Shade some cells such that each shaded cell has at least one shaded cell directly beneath (except for shaded cells on the bottom row). In a row, there may not exist a consecutive run of three or more shaded cells. Clued cells cannot be shaded, and represent the total number of shaded cells that share an edge with the clue (cells containing a ? can have any number of shaded cells around them, including 0).

A couple of small GAPP 101s for this puzzle:
- Every shaded cell must 'escape' to the bottom of the grid: sometimes there are very few possible routes, especially with small number clues around.
- Sometimes, shading a cell immediately forces another cell underneath it to be shaded: again this can be powerful around small clues.

Here are the previous appearances of Tawa in GAPP:
- 2022-03-26-shye: Archive: Saturday, 26 March 2022 (Supersized)
- 2022-02-15-jovi: Archive: Tuesday, 15 February 2022

Acquire a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 2:45 or less!
Obtain a Quick Crab 🦀 by solving the puzzle in 5:30 or less!
And all solvers who complete the puzzle will be rewarded with a Tawamubengal Florican 🐦

Example (Puzz.link), by shye: https://tinyurl.com/2d3zkxck
Puzzle (Puzz.link): https://tinyurl.com/59h79hzh