Broken Sign Blog
#025: Rail Pool / Double Back
29 July 2022
Double Back is a fun loop genre, but it also makes for an interesting additional constraint in other genres, so here’s a hybrid. I accidentally ended up stealing the region layout from a Detour/Double Back hybrid by wen. Whoops.
#024: Aqre — "Sunglasses"
18 July 2022
I’ve seen a couple of puzzles use gimmicks like this (usually Minesweepers) but no Aqres. Making my self-imposed theme work was a bit of a pain but I’m happy with the result. I’m afraid you’ll have to solve this one on Penpa.
#023: Rail Pool — "Power of 2"
17 June 2022
I discovered this by accident while working on something else, but it made for a neat puzzle on its own. It turns out that 2-clues are particularly constraining in Rail Pool (and if a puzzle has any, they’re often a good place to look for a break-in).
#022: Rail Pool (Cipher)
17 June 2022
I had wanted to make a Rail Pool cipher that also spells the genre name for weeks, but just couldn’t get anything to work in a way I liked. Once it occurred to me that I could spell it out diagonally, things fell into place pretty quickly and I think the resulting logic is quite fun, too.
#021: Rail Pool (Triangular, Partial)
16 June 2022
I haven’t seen a lot of loop puzzles on triangular grids. I suspect part of the reason is that triangular grids have the opposite problem of hex grids: the reduced amount of choices constrains the loop way too strongly. Also, for Rail Pool in particular, the naive way of having loops on triangular grids would give all line segments a length of 1. I think I’ve come up with a nice solution to this problem that I will be exploring with other loop genres in the future.
#020: Rail Pool (Unequal Lengths)
15 June 2022
Unequal Lengths is one of my favourite universal loop variants, so naturally I had to try it for Rail Pool. It’s a fairly simple and intuitive variant, but it adds a lot of constraints which let you get a way with very few clues from the base genre.
#019: Rail Pool (Hexagonal)
10 June 2022
I love exploring puzzles (and other systems) on different types of grids, and a hex grid seemed like the lowest-hanging fruit for Rail Pool. As it turns out, constructing loop puzzles on hex grids is surprisingly difficulty because the additional freedom makes it quite tough to constrain the loop sufficiently.
#018: Double Back (Forgetful)
6 June 2022
Inspired by a Rassi Silai variant by bakpao, I wanted to explore the idea of omitting exactly one cell per region with other genres. Double Back seemed like a particularly good fit, so this is where I tried it first. I also decided to give it a slightly more evocative name. :)
#017: Aqre (Arbitrary Regions) — "Tilted Square"
3 June 2022
Tilted square themes seem to be a bit of a meme, so it only seemed appropriate to go down this route for a puzzle where I wanted to double down on this variant’s cursedness by using only fractional clues. I promise that apart from the slightly fiddly counting this is actually a fun solve.
#016: Aqre (Arbitrary Regions)
3 June 2022
This is my favourite of the dual Aqres I’ve made so far and probably even one of my personal favourites overall. This requires some really fun logic that doesn’t really show up this way in any other genre I’m aware of.