Saturday, 17 May 2025

Menderbug

Yesterday was my second anniversary on the GAPP team, so this is going to be my final (regularly scheduled) puzzle. And what else could it be than a supersized Choco Banana. Thanks for having me for these past two years! I'd like to think I learned a lot about making interesting easy puzzles. Anyway, I was curious and put together some stats about my time here from our internal tracking sheet:

- I wrote 152 puzzles not counting bonus or collaborative puzzles, which puts me just barely in second place (I'm a handful of puzzles ahead of Walker, Shye and Jovi, so I won't keep that spot for long).
- Coincidentally, those were split exactly half and half between new genres and revisits.
- The category breakdown is 52 for shading, 52 for loop/path/network/snake/sliding/line drawing, 30 for region division, 12 for object placement, 7 for number/word placement.
- My most commonly featured genre was, you'll never guess it, Choco Banana, with 7 puzzles including variants. Isowatari is in second with 5 puzzles.

I hope you enjoyed solving the puzzles as much as I enjoyed writing them!

Rules: Shade some cells so that all areas of orthogonally connected shaded cells are rectangular and all areas of orthogonally connected unshaded cells are not rectangular. A clue represents the size of its group of shaded/unshaded cells.

Sorry about the lack of portrait orientation today. If you really want to solve this one on mobile, you can zoom and pan with two fingers, but be careful about accidentally shading a cell while doing this.

Score a Speedy Sloth 🦥 by solving the puzzle in 4:00 or less!
Collect a Quick Crab 🦀 by completing the puzzle in 8:00 or less!
Finish the puzzle in your own time to become the proud owner of a Grateful Great Grebe 🐦!

Example (pzprxs) by Shye: https://tinyurl.com/mw6t7vv7
Puzzle (pzrpxs): https://tinyurl.com/muy3tufu