Tuesday, 8 April 2025

Menderbug

Last week's Twilight Tapa seemed to be quite popular, so today I proudly introduce Twilight Tuesday! (Not actually.) As I mentioned last time, there are two rulesets called Twilight Cave. In one, the shaded clues take on a completely different meaning (they count shaded group size), but I personally prefer the purely antisymmetric interpretation that you've already seen in the Tapa variant, so that's what we're doing today.

Speaking of twilight! My second anniversary on the GAPP team is coming up next month, and I'll be stepping down from the team then. Two years seems like a good amount of time to have spent on this project. It's been a lot of fun, and I think I learned a lot as a puzzle setter, but I'd like to recover that puzzle-writing time for other projects. You've got about eight puzzles left from me before then.

Rules:
Shade some cells so that the shaded cells are all connected orthogonally by other shaded cells to the edge of the grid, and the remaining unshaded cells form one orthogonally connected area.
Clues represent the total number of cells of the same shading that can be seen in a straight, uninterrupted line vertically or horizontally, including itself.

Of course, this wouldn't be a Cave on GAPP without the usual GAPP 101: Any 2x2 area of a cave puzzle cannot be a checkerboard of shaded and unshaded cells. This is because to connect the unshaded cells and have just one single cave, you would have to wrap around one of the shaded cells, and in turn stop it from connecting to the edge of the grid.

Score a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 2:30 or less!
Collect a Quick Crab 🦀 by completing the puzzle in 5:00 or less!
Finish the puzzle in your own time to become the proud owner of a Twilight Twinspot 🐦!

Example (Penpa+) https://tinyurl.com/275uw2zy (on the trickier side!)
Puzzle (Penpa+): https://tinyurl.com/28fn4ezd