Broken Sign Blog
#035: Wall Maze
19 September 2022
There’s a somewhat common variant for shading puzzles where exactly one cell adjacent to each border segment must be shaded. I’d never seen it applied to loops so I thought I’d try and make a new loop genre from it. As it turns out, this genre already exists under the name of Wall Maze, though it’s fairly obscure. Here is an introductory puzzle.
#034: FourCells
15 September 2022
After clearing all FourCells puzzles in the database, I wanted to try constructing one with logic I hadn’t seen in any of the puzzles I solved. Here is the result. Fair warning, it’s probably on the harder side.
#033: Chained Block — "Broken Chain"
13 September 2022
I’ve been meaning get into Chained Block, it seems like a cool genre. I originally wanted to make a puzzle containing only 3 clues, but David Altizio beat me to it this morning, so I went for a different number instead. The result is a bit meme-y, but I think it’s still quite fun to solve.
#032: Rail Pool — "Broken Sign"
6 September 2022
Welcome! This is the first puzzle originally made for this blog. The earlier posts are all backdated, as I wanted to keep a record of some of the better puzzles I made over the last few months.
#031: Tapa-Like Loop
30 August 2022
I recently cleared all Tapa-Like Loops in the puzz.link database, so here’s a new one. I quite like the break-in, but I’m not super happy with how much progress you can make without it. The pains of clue symmetry.
#030: Rail Pool (Crossing)
8 August 2022
I don’t have a lot of experience with crossing loop genres yet, but I think it’s quite interesting how they mess with your intuition for how separate loop segments must connect.
#029: Ant Mill
7 August 2022
While constructing my first Ant Mill, I discovered some interesting patterns that I wanted to turn into their own puzzle. I also wanted to go for much sparser clue placement this time, which I think worked out nicely.
#028: Ant Mill
6 August 2022
Ant Mill is a new genre by Eric Fox. I really enjoyed his first two puzzles, so I wanted to try and construct one myself. In principle it should be possible to make a squares-only Ant Mill, but for a first attempt I figured using one cross was justifiable.
#027: Rail Pool (Forgetful)
4 August 2022
This is by far the hardest Rail Pool (or puzzle in general) I’ve constructed to date. The break-in requires some very intricate logic and the rest of the puzzle isn’t all smooth sailing either. I really enjoy this variant though, so I’ll probably make some easier forgetful Rail Pools at some point.
#026: Four-letter Triptych
30 July 2022
My first genre mashup! I constructed this for Logic Showcase #37 on Puzzlers Club, “Now You’re Thinking with Portals” and ended up winning. The prompt asked to construct puzzles with “portals”, i.e. regions of identical shapes whose contents must match up to some transformation.