Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Puzzles #516, #517 & #518 - So Many Bees Part 3

For secret solver last year, I was assigned to write a puzzle for dylanamite. I did not write a puzzle, I wrote a 26 puzzle set that I'll be posting over the next 6 days, ending on the 10th with the full PDF that was sent. When Jamie signed Dylan up (Dylan would have anyway) he did so with the comment "please send me so many bees". And so, I sent so, so, so many bees.


Just so many bees.

GeraBEEweg
Standard Geradeweg rules apply on an irregular grid. For the puzzlink interface, any "0" clue is not part of the grid.
I knew I wanted one puzzle on a bee shaped grid, and while I don't have much to say on this puzzle I do have a funny story around the puzzle. My 4 year old Matthew thought that most of these puzzles were funny because "there's a bee in my puzzle!". When I showed him this puzzle, his response was "there's a puzzle in my bee!" followed by laughing with a huge smile.
Honey Islands
Standard Honey Islands rules apply. Look, it was obvious that I needed to use this genre it's the closest to a bee themed genre to begin with. The only other thing to mention here is that the background color is "yelow", parodying an event in Dylan's parody game show BuckBlosters called "What's Below the Yelow". I think, I'm nowhere near up to date on the lore of this but making the background "yelow" was funny. And I always erred on the side of what I thought was funny.

Icebarn Full of Honey
The rules of this Icebarn variant are: Draw a path through the centers of some cells, entering the grid at the “IN” marking and exiting at the “OUT” marking. The path must travel through all of the arrows in the indicated direction. Two perpendicular line segments may intersect each other only on icy cells, but they may not turn at their intersection or otherwise overlap. Each orthogonally connected group of icy cells must be passed through at least once. The path must travel straight on icy cells except when travelling straight would travel into a honey cell, where the path must turn instead. Honey cells may not be passed through.
I really like this variant rule, it's a bit hard to explain mechanically but it also intuitively works well with ice. The puzzle was a bit hard to make but I think that's mostly from the layout and type of puzzle I was going for.

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