Sunday, 11 May 2025

Lavaloid

In our internal spreadsheet, we keep track of various stats related to the puzzles, and one of them is the cell count. Before today, the puzzle with the fewest cells was Walker's Arithmetic Square with 9 cells. Today's ✨ Strange-Shaped Sunday ✨ is a Tsuroku with 8 cells, which beats the record!

Rules:
- Within each hexagon, draw three line segments that connect the midpoints of two sides, so that no two of them share an endpoint. Two adjacent hexagons cannot have the same pairings, even when rotated or reflected. (See image for all possible pairings.)
- Every line segment must belong to a path that starts and ends on the edge of the grid. Every letter marks the endpoint of one of the paths; identical letters correspond to the same path, different letters correspond to different paths.
- Along any path, no two consecutive line segments can be of the same length. (Or equivalently, consecutive line segments must take different amounts of "steps" around the hexagon. See the image for explanation.)

Finish the puzzle in 2:45 or less for a Speedy Sloth 🦥!
Finish the puzzle in 6:00 or less for a Quick Crab 🦀!
Finish with any time at all for an Hexagonal Heron 🐦!

Example (Penpa+): https://tinyurl.com/26vzvfus
Puzzle (Penpa+): https://tinyurl.com/2bvv2cau