Broken Sign Blog
#045: Rail Tool
12 October 2022
I’ve been fascinated by this concept since seeing a Twopa puzzle for the first time and finally got around to applying it to Rail Pool. This took quite a while to construct. I had a first working version early on, but it was already unique after adding just a couple of clues on the right-hand side, which felt very unbalanced. So I had to go back to the drawing board and try again.
#044: Nurikabe (Unequal Lengths)
12 October 2022
“Unequal Lengths” is the best generic variant for loop genres. I like it so much that I went ahead and applied it to a non-loop genre. I’ve been meaning to try this with shading genres for a while, but a puzzle by @wand_125 reminded me today.
#043: Rail Pool (Partial)
4 October 2022
This is a variant I’ve been meaning to try out for ages (though I technically did with the triangular Rail Pool). There’s no particular reason why I made Rail Pool a “full” loop genre, though I suppose most region-based loop genres are full or impose rules on the unvisited cells. But in principle Rail Pool works just as well without that constraint.
#042: Serpentominous
3 October 2022
This concludes my initial set of puzzles introducing this genre. This one is quite a bit harder than the other two. Here, I wanted to see how far I could take the “consecutive pentominoes must be different” rule.
#041: Serpentominous
3 October 2022
While this puzzle is even smaller than the introductory puzzle, it’s probably a little harder. You might be able to solve this with some bashing, but there’s a really neat solution involving a bit of theory.
#040: Serpentominous
3 October 2022
A new genre! Last week’s Pentominous puzzles on GMP made me wonder, “what if the pentominoes and the adjacency rule only existed along a path”. I made a few puzzles to see what kind of logic emerges from that and I quite like the results. Here is a small introduction.
#039: Cross the Aqre
23 September 2022
There’s been a few interesting Aqre hybrids with very low clue density posted on Discord lately, so I wanted in on the fun. I’m slightly bothered by the clue layout, but couldn’t find anything I liked using the bottom row.
#038: Wall Maze — "Turnstiles"
19 September 2022
This is definitely the hardest of the Wall Mazes I’ve constructed, but there’s a clean logical solve path here that doesn’t require any deep lookaheads and is worth finding.
#037: Wall Maze — "Quadrants"
19 September 2022
I originally set out to make a puzzle that is only divided down the middle into two halves. But as I started constructing it, I realised I could get much more interesting logic by dividing the grid further.
#036: Wall Maze
19 September 2022
This was actually the first Wall Maze I constructed, but I wanted to slip in a simpler one to introduce the genre beforehand and give people a feel for the basic deductions before breaking out the fancier logic.