Wednesday, 10 April 2024

Freddie Hand

Looking through the 24HPC instruction booklets, I see the old and the new, the tried-and-tested and the obscure, and just a smattering of the have-no-right-to-be-a-genre. But there is only one true genre to rule them all, the Tapa Egg. Be careful about how you bind the darkness in this puzzle.

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

Exactly one orthogonally connected area of unshaded cells must exist of each size from the range given outside the grid (for the example this is 1-5; for the GAPP it is 1-9).

Note: It may be helpful to mark the sizes given below the grid as you form regions - but if you are shading them grey, remember to unshade them/shade them green at the end for the answer checker to work!

Here's the most recent previous non-variant appearance of Tapa in GAPP.
2023-11-07-shye: Archive: Tuesday, 7 November 2023

Acquire a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 2:15 or less!
Obtain a Quick Crab 🦀 by solving the puzzle in 4:30 or less!
And all solvers who complete the puzzle will be rewarded with an Omelette Omani Owl 🐦

Example (Penpa+): https://tinyurl.com/2cc94tqc
Puzzle (Penpa+): https://tinyurl.com/25xs5ha7