Broken Sign Blog
#123: Subomino
30 September 2023
Subomino is a Fillomino variant that was invented last year by Japanese Twitter user @homerestaurant3 (to the best of my knowledge). I randomly remembered its existence today and decided to try and construct a puzzle. It’s quite tough, but the logic along the solve path has some nice variety.
#122: Aqre
21 September 2023
A completely normal puzzle, who would’ve thought. I felt like making a bigger and fairly flowy puzzle and Aqre seemed like a fun genre for that. Due to my chosen theme I still ended up with some stickier points in the solve path, but there shouldn’t be anything unreasonable.
#121: Wittgenstein Cave
21 September 2023
Another genre hybrid. Wittgenstein Briquet, also known as Desk Place, was recently added to puzz.link. I really like the genre, and it got me wondering about potential variants.
#120: Ring Pool
21 September 2023
I made this one for a speed setting contest on the CtC Discord server. The prompt was to make a hybrid of any two genres, and the idea of combining Rail Pool and Ring-Ring had been on my todo list for a long time.
#119: Cogs — "Pocket Watch"
7 September 2023
Shye rediscovered the genre Cogs the other day and made a great puzzle in it. It’s an interesting genre and I couldn’t resist the urge to make something cursed.
#118: Cross the Streams (Twilight)
6 September 2023
This was my second entry to Logic Showcase #49 on Puzzlers Club, “Twilight Sparkle”. Shortly before the deadline, I had a really cursed idea and wanted to see if I could apply the Twilight variant to a genre where the clues are normally not even part of the grid.
#117: Aqre (Twilight)
6 September 2023
This was my first entry to Logic Showcase #49 on Puzzlers Club, “Twilight Sparkle”. The prompt was to set variant puzzles where shaded (or otherwise covered) clues behave differently from unshaded clues. The idea of Twilight Aqre had been on my to-do list since the Twilight Cave I made for last year’s Black-Out Friday.
#116: Water Walk
24 August 2023
My little Ice Walk derivative has been implemented on puzz.link! You can now find a few more puzzles using these rules over on Puzzle Square, including a neat little Ice Walk doppel I posted to introduce the genre.
#115: World Puzzle Championship 2022
7 August 2023
Last year, I had the honour to provide a number of puzzles to the World Puzzle Championship, held in Krakow, Poland, that year. There’s an embargo on those puzzles where only the WPF may publish them, but that has expired by now, so I can finally share them here as well. There’ll be a bit of a wall of text while I talk about the individual puzzles, so scroll down for a whole bunch of solving fun.
#114: Lohkous vs. Rail Pool vs. Tapa-Like Loop
9 July 2023
This was my entry to Logic Showcase #47 on Puzzlers Club, “Mixed Signals”. The prompt was to make mashups of genres with the same clue type, where the solver has to determine which genre each clue belongs to. The puzzle won the showcase, though only by tie-breaker.