Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Freddie Hand

Today's puzzle is a Slitherlink (Sheep and Wolves). No cabbage or boat, luckily.

Rules: Connect some pairs of orthogonally adjacent dots to form a single non-intersecting loop. To be clear, all line segments are horizontal or vertical, not diagonal. Clues represent the number of edges drawn surrounding the clue (up to four). Sheep must be inside the loop, and wolves must be outside the loop.

In case you need a refresher, here's the last standard Slitherlink in GAPP by Walker: Archive: Saturday, 14 October 2023

Solving Note: Inside/outside colouring is generally useful in Slitherlink, but is particularly important for this variant. There are a few properties of colouring that are useful:
- If two adjacent cells do not/cannot have a line segment between them (which you can mark with an "x" on the edge), then they are either both outside the loop or inside the loop.
- If two adjacent cells have a line segment between them, then one of them is inside the loop and one of them is outside the loop.
- For a cell on the border of the grid, if there is an edge between the cell and the outside of the grid, then that cell is inside the loop, and if there is no edge, then that cell is outside the loop.
If you wish to rely even more heavily on colouring, the following are helpful:
- No 2x2 area can be a checkerboard of inside and outside cells.
- All cells inside the loop must be connected; all cells outside the loop must connect to the edge of the grid.
There is a tickable "allow inputting background color when cell center is clicked" option that is highly recommended.

Acquire a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving in 2:45 or less!
Obtain a Quick Crab 🦀 by solving in 5:30 or less!
And all who finish will be rewarded with an Enclosure Enggano Thrush 🐦

Example (pzprxs) from pzprxs rules page: https://tinyurl.com/53k4n5mn
Puzzle (pzprxs): https://tinyurl.com/zfkn5dzt