Serkan posed a challenge to create a 10x10 Tapa Line (Tapa rules + 4 shaded cells in a row is banned) puzzle with as large of an empty space as possible. After the obvious degenerate case of a single shaded cell clued with just one row and column, a couple people tried making serious puzzles. An 8x8 empty middle was found pretty quickly, but I felt 8x9 would be possible. And it was.
The tiebreaker was to be the lowest sum of clues, so a few values are lower than they otherwise need to be. I also showcased a degenerate case that would allow for an arbitrarily large empty region on arbitrarily large grids, even with the constraint that every row and column must have a shaded cell. Really, there is no good formulation of an optimization challenge like this that doesn't end up with a degenerate puzzle allowed!
I actually made these three Tapa puzzles a few weeks ago. The first was the result of trying to find a neat antisymmetric design, the second came after playing around with latticed ?? clues in pzprrt (but made by hand later), and the third was just because I wanted to make a standard Tapa afterward. No extra tricks.
The 111 clue in the last one wrinkles a little bit, but I couldn't find another nice way to make the theme resolve. I normally avoid "21", instead formatting it as 12, but it just had to be 21 here.
Making a Tapa on a hexagonal grid was something that I'd wanted to do for quite a while, and Hexagony was the perfect opportunity to make it.
