Wednesday, 2 July 2025

jovi_al

Hi everyone! Sorry for being so late with today's puzzle. I've been dealing with a lot of IRL stuff and some nontrivial medical issues that have majorly thrown off my neurochemistry, meaning I'm running a bit more slowly than normal and am unable to focus on previously simple things. I'll recover, don't worry!

Unrelated, I'm a bunny-flavored furry! I picked today's genre, Kuromenbun, because it has "bun" in the name, and then I realized that "bun" commonly shows up in region division puzzle genre names. Why? I'll leave that for the reader to discover.

While setting this, I fell in love with this genre. At first, I was frustrated that I couldn't make it work how I wanted it to, and then it clicked and I realized just how much there is to it! If you give making these a go, a word of warning: it is extremely, extremely easy to accidentally make assumptions and produce non-unique puzzles. I caught every instance of this while setting, but it would be pretty easy to let one fall through the cracks.

Rules: Shade some cells. Both region borders and shaded cells indicate the boundaries of unshaded blocks. Numbers must not be shaded and give the number of shaded cells vertically or horizontally adjacent to the block the number is in. A block has at most one number.

To earn a Speedy Sloth 🦥, solve today's puzzle in 3:00 or less!
To net a Quick Crab 🦀, solve today's puzzle in 6:45 or less!
All other solvers are well-deserving of a Bird in a Bunny Costume 🐦!

Today's example is colored to show the different blocks. Penpa+ is also given as a solving interface in case you want to do the same!

Example (pzprxs): https://tinyurl.com/yeyr3f3p
Example (Penpa+): https://tinyurl.com/2chlv5k5
Puzzle (pzprxs): https://tinyurl.com/5amvhy3y
Puzzle (Penpa+): https://tinyurl.com/2cssl9mn

Finally, a solving tip: Extend blocks so that the shadeable perimeter is at least the number in the block.