Broken Sign Blog
#055: Moon and Sun (Dance / Nested)
11 November 2022
My first doppel! I constructed this for Logic Showcase #40 on Puzzlers Club, “Single-Genre Stacking” and ended up reaching second place. The prompt was to make puzzles that have at least two solutions under some constraints, such as Twopa puzzles. I had two ideas for how to interpret the prompt for a loop puzzle and decided to go for the ultimate flex and construct a doppel for both options.
#054: Castle Wall
28 October 2022
After the last few puzzles I figured I should force myself to just make a normal puzzle in a normal genre. Enjoy!
#053: Aqre (Arbitrary Regions)
27 October 2022
I recently constructed an Aqre for this year’s WPC, inspired by my dual-grid Aqres, where the clue regions were rotated by 45°. That did make me wonder whether there was a way to go even wilder with arbitrary regions. Well…
#052: Aqre (Hexagonal, Arbitrary Regions)
25 October 2022
This has been on my list of puzzles to construct since I decided to rename the variant from “Offset” to “Dual”, but somehow it still took me months to actually sit down and make one. I might construct some bigger ones in the future, but for now here’s something small to get a taste of this variant.
#051: Tapa Rope (Lasso)
21 October 2022
This is the last Tapa Rope variation I have planned for now. Since the Logic Showcase prompt specified that the clues could be either paths or loops, naturally I had to see what happens with each submission when generalising from one to the other. It’s a little odd how the placement of a rope’s clue is now a bit arbitrary, but we do get a lot of neat new logic.
#050: Heyablock
18 October 2022
I’m taking a short break from the Tapa Rope variations to celebrate Heyablock support on pzprxs. I recently discovered this genre in Toketa Vol. 1 and I’m in love with it. It feels like a mix of Shimaguni and Heyawake, combining some of the best features of both genres.
#049: Tapa Rope (Joined Clues)
17 October 2022
Things continue to get weirder. We can take the Multiple Ropes variant a little further by allowing ropes to attach to clues on both ends. This is probably too wild to make a lot of puzzles with, but I thought it’s worth exploring at least some of the resulting logic.
#048: Tapa Rope (Multiple Ropes)
16 October 2022
We’re now straying a little further from vanilla Tapa Rope, but this is probably the variant I’m most excited about. The extra flexibility from having multiple ropes per clue adds a lot of logical expressiveness to the genre, as hopefully shown by this puzzle.
#047: Tapa Rope (Crossing)
15 October 2022
The most obvious generalisation of the Tapa Rope rules is allowing the ropes to cross. I think the rules here are intuitive enough that I wouldn’t even consider this a variant, but keeping the vanilla rules as simple as possible makes sense. I will likely be using crossing ropes in conjunction with other variants in the future, because they let you do some interesting things.
#046: Tapa Rope
14 October 2022
I hosted the most recent Logic Showcase on Puzzlers Club and challenged people to construct puzzles which involved paths or loops as clues. There were a bunch of interesting entries, but I’m particularly intrigued by the showcase’s winner, DireKrow’s Tapa Rope. I’ll be exploring a few generalisations of the ruleset, but before we get into that, here’s an introductory vanilla puzzle.