Sunday, 7 January 2024

Menderbug

Walkthrough for yesterday's Tasquare: https://youtu.be/NpRgFmj6-4s

I have the honour of bringing you this year's first Strange-Shaped Sunday. And what a strange shape we have today. This Aquapelago uses a Deltoidal Trihexagonal grid. Transferring the no-unshaded-2x2 rule to this grid might take a little getting used to, so I've included a diagram showing the three disallowed configurations. I hope the almost-symmetry of the main puzzle doesn't cause any excessive twitching of eyelids, but I already spent way too long on trying to make this puzzle work at all.

If you want to solve some regular Aquapelagos for warmup, we've covered the genre a few times now:

Archive: Thursday, 24 August 2023 by me
Archive: Saturday, 7 October 2023 by Shye
Archive: Saturday, 4 November 2023 (supersized) by Freddie
Archive: Tuesday, 12 December 2023 by Shye

Rules: Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are share an edge and the remaining unshaded cells form one edge-connected area. No internal grid vertex can be surrounded entirely by unshaded cells. Clued cells must be shaded, and indicate the number of shaded cells in the vertex-connected group they belong to.

Score a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 3:00 or less!
Collect a Quick Crab 🦀 by completing the puzzle in 6:00 or less!
Finish the puzzle in your own time to become the proud owner of a Wacky Island Rail 🐦!

Example (Penpa+): http://tinyurl.com/yl6rk7gg
Puzzle (Penpa+): http://tinyurl.com/yk9cn33b