Puzzle #600 - Interconnected Secret

This year for Secret Solver I was assigned feadoor, someone I know is quite a good solver and constructor across a variety of puzzle types. I wanted to try to lean into as much of those types as I could, remembering the Skyscrapers and Sudoku from a GP round, Yajilin from Yajilin and Variations, and Heyawake from Heyawake Hike. The rest of the genres were picked to cooperate with the connections between grids, and lead to a final secret. I did a lot of planning before any actual construction here!

Anyway, here's all the rules. The short version is that standard rules apply for each individual puzzle, and that cages marked with the same letter must have the same pattern of shaded cells. Country Road requires all regions, and unused cells are considered shaded. Nanro (Signpost), the numbered cells are considered shaded. Skyscraper Sudoku is 1-6 in each row, column and region. Domino Yajilin counts the number of shaded cells.

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I really should have taken my own advice and not made an interconnected puzzle - it's very stressful when something starts not working, or seems like it might not resolve. I also ended up doing most of the writing over 2 days, with a few scattered bits of progress before that point. I even brought a notebook with transcriptions of the starting points (determined links) for 3 puzzles to a relatives' for Christmas Eve, and finished those puzzles there!

To think my original idea involved having to figure out the cage matching as part of solving... that would have been impossible within the time I ended up having, and especially with the other constraints.

Puzzles #519, #520 & #521 - So Many Bees Part 4

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 5 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.

Kropki Pairs but I spilled bees on my puzzle

The rules of this Kropki variant are: Place a number from 1 to N into each cell so that each row and column contains every number from that range with no repeats, where N is the side length of the grid. Pairs of orthogonally adjacent cells marked with a black dot must contain numbers with a 1:2 ratio. Pairs of orthogonally adjacent cells marked with a white dot must contain consecutive numbers. Pairs of orthogonally adjacent cells marked with a bee must contain neither.

Partial Kropki is such a fun variant rule, giving much tighter control of the solve path. But the negative constraint is quite strong too, and so introducing a third symbol (in this case, a bee) to keep that logic alive is interesting. Not sure if this variant has legs but I like the puzzle - I made a few errors in constructing and had to throw out a few false starts though, it's easy to mis-scan.

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Lollipops

Standard Lollipops rules apply. I had to sacrifice clue symmetry a bit to get this one to work, it's not a super fun genre to construct. By this point in the project I had decided I was going to falsely thank some people for helping, and the tilted square in the middle is a dead giveaway of a djmathman puzzle. Not really, obviously, but it was funny. The astute reader will have noticed something about the order of puzzles thus far and one that's missing, and all will be revealed in part 9.

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Nanro [Bees]

Standard Nanro rules apply, with the additional rule that all cells with bees in them must remain empty / unnumbered.

Tilted square again, with regions shaped like a bee, sort of. This can't quite be captured without empty cells that are part of a region (since it makes regions discontinuous), though it is just given empties with are usually a kludge. Since they were part of the design intention from the beginning they don't feel like one here, though, which is philosophically interesting to me.

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Puzzle #253 - Seeing Double (Double Nanro)

I often struggle to construct puzzle types with regions like Nanro- something about drawing the regions and giving clues just doesn't click right with me. That said, when I set out to make this run of variant puzzles I knew I had to try Double Nanro- solve as a regular Nanro, except instead of having exactly N instances of N in a region, have exactly 2 connected groups of N in a region. So a region with a 2 would contain four 2s, in two groups of two. This was a really fun variant to work with, even if it's not difficult to run into constructing dead ends. I'd love to see more of these, as there's definitely some interesting logic I didn't tap here!

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Puzzle #87 - Nanro (11)

Yes, you read that right. This is a Nanro puzzle that only gives the number 11 in the grid. And only 1, to boot.

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Bonus content: This scrapped puzzle that was almost the original version of this one. Unfortunately, I made a bad deduction and the given 2 wasn't forced, and there was no way to keep that chain of logic intact under the theme.