Puzzles #366, #367 & #368 - Hexagony Kakuro

Hexagony needed number placement genres, and the usual latin square genres wouldn't make the jump effectively. The obvious solution was to pick a genre that didn't really care about representing every number in its set, and that was Kakuro. I haven't made too many of these but knew I was up to the task as I've solved a ton and know a lot of cool tricks that sometimes come up. Even still, the hexagonal one was the first puzzle made for Hexagony as I knew that hexagonal number placement would prove to be one of the biggest challenges to get into a good place.

puzz.link interface

I'm actually quite happy with how this example turned out, as it shows everything I wanted to show. Some rows aren't clued at all, large and small restricted sums are used, and min-maxing intersections is important as well. It's not the full Kakuro toolkit, not even close, but it does the job.

puzz.link interface

Much later, I went to fill in some of the missing gaps in construction with the necessary difficulties. An easier puzzle was needed, and so I made this "Plus or Minus" puzzle, which solves in two halves. The bottom is mostly straightforward, while the top is quite tough without a critical insight.

penpa interface

I really wanted to sneak in some triangular min-maxing here, but the addition never quite worked out in the end. Despite only having 13 more cells (33%) more than the first Kakuro in the contest, this was worth 45 points- 3 times as much! Some of the required chaining is hard to spot, and there are a lot more sums that are only used to fill one cell after another is resolved. This one is a bit rough around the edges and could have been better- I'll probably revisit the type some time down the road.