Broken Sign Blog
#049: Tapa Rope (Joined Clues)
17 October 2022Things 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.
Rules: 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 along the length of rope attached to the clue, not necessarily in order. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded.
Variant: Multiple Ropes — If multiple ropes are attached to a clue, the clued blocks of shaded cells can be distributed among these ropes in any way (including some ropes having no shaded cells at all).
Joined Clues — If a rope connects two clues, it contributes its blocks of shaded cells to both clues.