Broken Sign Blog
#084: Delightful Dice
28 February 2023This is mostly just an appetiser for the next post. My submission to the Logic Showcase pretended to be just this collection of mini puzzles, with the actual puzzle hidden as a surprise in the congratulations message.
It was a bit of a gamble (no pun intended), because some people might miss the real puzzle. But I was hoping that this collection would be easier than any of the other proper submissions, so a lot of people would get it, and someone would spill the beans for everyone else eventually. That worked out alright, and I like to think the brief moment of awe and terror experienced by those who solved this one was worth it.
The actual origin story of these puzzles is that after working on the big guy for a few days, I felt like I needed a break and so I made a tiny puzzle in each of the six genres. Unfortunately, I had to switch to Partial Rail Pool for the mini puzzles, because there is no unique vanilla Rail Pool on a 1x1x1 die.
Rules: Each small grid is a separate puzzle and represents the net of a six-sided die, with outer edges connected as you’d expect. Thick outer edges represent region boundaries and do not affect whether that edge is connected to its counterpart.
Castle Wall: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells. The loop may not enter grey cells. A number represents the sum of the lengths of loop segments in the indicated direction. Note that the arrow is effectively bidirectional, since the clue can see all the way around the die.
Country Road: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells which passes through each region exactly once. A number in a region represents how many cells in the region are visited by the loop. Orthogonally adjacent cells across a region border may not both be unused.
Ice Walk: Draw a loop through the centres of some cells which passes through each numbered cell. The loop may not turn on icy cells. The loop may cross itself perpendicularly on icy cells, but nowhere else. A number indicates how many cells make up the continuous non-icy section of the loop that the number is on.
Mukkonn Enn: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of all cells. When the loop exits a clued cell from a side with a number, it must travel in a straight line for exactly the indicated number of cells (turning on the Nth cell, where N is the value of the clue). A number does not necessarily mean that the clue must be exited from its side.
Rail Pool (Partial): Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells. Some boldly outlined regions contain number clues. If a straight loop segment visits any cells of a clued region, its length must match one of these numbers. Each number must correspond to at least one such loop segment.
Vagabond: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of all cells. No two adjacent regions may be visited by the loop the same number of times. A number in a region indicates how many times it’s visited by the loop.