Broken Sign Blog
#075: Amoebas
17 January 2023Amoebas was my favourite genre in Toketa Vol. 2 and now that I’m done with the book, I wanted to construct one myself. I’m really intrigued by the idea of time series puzzles in general. I’ve only seen a couple of other genres like this, and Amoebas seems to be the most interesting one of them.
This puzzle is quite tough, especially if you haven’t seen the genre before, but there’s a clean solve path without any bashing that I think is really neat.
Rules: Fill some cells with positive integers, each representing the size of an amoeba. Some amoebas are already given. The number at the top right of each grid indicates the total number of amoebas in that grid.
The individual grids represent the same petri dish at different points in time (with arrows indicating their order). At each step, some amoebas move one cell orthogonally or diagonally to a smaller amoeba to eat them, leaving behind an empty cell. The resulting amoeba’s size is the sum of the eating and eaten amoebas’ sizes.
Multiple amoebas cannot move into the same cell at the same timestep. Two adjacent amoebas can only both remain unchanged in a timestep if they have the same size. In the last timestep, all remaining amoebas must be unable to eat another amoeba.