IHNN's Puzzle Emporium: January 2025

Monday, January 27, 2025

Puzzles #738 - #746 - Santa's Choco Banana

For the Secret Solver puzzle exchange on Puzzle'rs Club this past December, I got assigned Menderbug, who had previously written for me back in 2022. My first idea was to do something with Rail Pool, but before I started working on that idea I had a thought - what if I took the same idea that was made for me - a series of Symmetry Area puzzles on increasingly less regular grids - and applied that to Menderbug's signup comment of "I like Choco Banana"? Once I had that idea, I had to go for it.

For all of these puzzles, all shaded areas must be convex and all unshaded areas must be concave. The entire pack can be found here.

My original plan was to make a small and large puzzle for each grid shape, and so I tried to focus on interesting logic for the smaller ones and that + a good layout for the large ones. Time pressure ended up pushing back some parts of this plan but the modular nature of the plan meant that I could easily scale back and have something that felt complete.

puzz.link interface

Menderbug is also the person who has pioneered triangular Choco Banana among the most, including making a few for GAPP. I definitely felt some pressure to try to deliver something new and interesting here, and while I'm not sure I succeeded I'm quite happy with what I ended up making.

penpa interface

Tetrakis Choco Banana has also been done before, though only with rectangle/not rectangle. I made so many mistaken deductions while trying to make these two puzzles... it's a weird geometry to get to grips with.

penpa interface

The last 3 puzzles are where the rules really start to fall apart a bit, as some of these geometries are really only good for a one-off puzzle. Rhombi worked okay but were prone to paired cell ambiguities, Snub Square actually worked very well and my biggest regret is only having time to make one of those, while Penrose... well, it's much like Rhombi except weirder. Definitely a one-off but a one-off worth exploring.

penpa interface

Overall I'm quite pleased with this set, and while Menderbug immediately thanked me specifically for it (not so secret) I knew that I was revealing my identity with the plan. He also said "I was going to say which puzzle/tiling I liked best, but I don't know, there was something really cool in each of them." after solving, which is very high praise indeed.

Sunday, January 26, 2025

Puzzles #735 - #737 - We Are So Back (Double Back Variants)

Continuing my backlog posting of old puzzles I haven't shared, here are the three puzzles I made for Logic Showcase 66. The prompt was to make a puzzle with a Double Back rule, and I took that prompt in three different directions.

The first puzzle I made was a Norinori where the unshaded cells had to be solved as a Double Back. In other words, draw a loop passing through all but 2 cells in every region, that enters and exits every region exactly twice. Cells unused by the loop should be shaded, and each shaded cell should have exactly 1 shaded neighbor. I had a lot of trouble finessing some parts of this to be unique near the end, which was a bit annoying given how nicely the start worked out.

puzz.link interface penpa interface

The second puzzle I made was an Aquapelago where each region has to have exactly two unshaded components. Originally I dabbled with a fully clueless grid for this but decided a few clues would be an important addition. The first version of this puzzle was also broken, unfortunately, but I was able to fix it.

puzz.link interface penpa interface

Finally, I knew I wanted to make a proper loop puzzle - not just a Yajilin-style mashup. So I combined Double Back with All or Nothing - solve as an All or Nothing where every region is visited either 0 or 2 times.

puzz.link interface penpa interface

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Puzzles #702 - #734 - Mini Threes Pack

So I've still had a lot of things going on in real life that have generally prevented me from having any time to work on puzzles, including having almost my entire holiday vacation suddenly taken up. Even as I write this I'm recovering from being sick, but being too sick to work but well enough to actually do things is somehow the sweet spot of being able to assemble things I've already previously made, as long as it was just assembly.

A few months ago I made a single puzzle using only a couple threes, and that set me down the path of trying to make a varied, interesting set of 3-only puzzles. Yesterday I put them all in a PDF and, fittingly (but annoyingly) took 3 tries to get everything in I wanted (forgot links once - there are links now!) and had 3 non-unique puzzles (all fixed now - I originally intended to re-test everything, but I was rushed and still recovering and that's a lesson learned for the future). So yeah. Here's a big pack of puzzles and hopefully the final version, thanks to CJK for informing me of the problems with the first versions. I think in the future I'll just use a post like this as a hub for any packs I put out - that way I can at least fix in-place easily.

Mini Threes Pack (PDF)

Puzzle links follow, I will not be adding 33 images to this post nor will I be compositing them all into one image to include. You'll have to check the PDF.