Broken Sign Blog
#026: Four-letter Triptych
30 July 2022My 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.
There’s a few things I’d like to improve about this if I ever revisit this concept, but I’m very proud of this puzzle given the time constraints.
Rules: Shade some cells according to standard Tapa, Cave, and Aqre rules in each grid (see below).
Dotted regions are portals. If a portal of the same shape and orientation appears in two different grids, their contents must match, up to a specific transformation. Each pair of grids uses a different transformation:
- Identity: the contents of both portals are the same.
- Negation: the contents of both portals are the same with shaded and unshaded cells swapped.
- Rotation: the contents of both portals are 180° rotations of each other.
It is up to you to determine which pair of grids uses which transformation.
Standard rules for reference:
Tapa: Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.
Cave: Shade some cells so that the shaded cells are all connected orthogonally by other shaded cells to the edge of the grid, and the remaining unshaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the total number of unshaded cells that can be seen in a straight line vertically or horizontally, including itself.
Aqre: Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Regions with numbers must contain the indicated amount of shaded cells. There may not exist a run of more than three consecutive shaded or unshaded cells horizontally or vertically anywhere in the grid.