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 7 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.
Dominion of Bees
Standard Dominion rules apply.I actually started making this puzzle as an 11x11, but in order to get the deductions I wanted to stick I had to enlarge the width to 13. Then the height had to grow to 13, and eventually all the way to 17 to have enough space. In the end, I think this ended up being one of the hardest puzzles in the entire set, and certainly the hardest non-variant. Also I made the puzzle image with emoji because why not, I was already going full meme with this set. The emoji could abbreviate to C (sea), U (you), B (bee), I (eye), T (tea) and Y (why), though there's no significance to this. I just thought it was funny.
Easy as a Unusually Large Amount of Bees
The rules of this Easy as ABC variant are as follows: Place symbols from the range given outside the grid into some cells so that each row and column contains each symbol once. A clue outside the grid represents the first symbol seen in the corresponding row or column from that direction. A clue with an X over it must be false. Some symbols and empty cells are given.Outside clues and what they can represent:
🅰️:🅰️🆎 - 🅱️:🅱️🆎🐝 - 🩸:🅰️🅱️🆎🅾️
Most of the wacky bee themed variant rules I came up with before constructing worked out pretty well. This one didn't. Easy as ABC is already a fairly weakly clued genre, and all I did here is weaken the clues even farther. Also the theming is based on the phrase "passerby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood" alongside an unusually large amount of bees being something that wouldn't be easy. The "X" clue is such a kludge that I'm sad about, but since this is already such a wild variant rule I didn't mind adding one more to fix a logical error.
FilloBEEno
The rules of this Fillomino variant are as follows: Divide the grid into regions of orthogonally connected cells. Two regions with the same number of non-bee cells may not share an edge. Clued cells must belong to a region containing the indicated number of non-bee cells.This variant rule is simultaneously very legit and also a complete one-off. I don't think there's much else to do with uncounting cells, at least with Fillomino. I think I've seen this done with Shikaku before where the region structure can work with the variant in a way that Fillomino doesn't.
