Broken Sign Blog
#085: Dreadful Die
28 February 2023This was my entry to Logic Showcase #42 on Puzzlers Club, “That’s a Wrap!”. The prompt was to make puzzles on grids whose edges wrap around in some way. This puzzle ended up netting my third win, though only by tie breaker.
One of my puzzle goals for this year was to try my hand at making some big genre mashups, or Alliterative Abominations as they’re sometimes called. I’ve built up quite a list of ideas of these over the last months and was hoping to tackle some of them. This idea in particular was fairly far down the list because it seemed way too ambitious for a first attempt. I wanted to tackle some of the simpler ideas first to get practice. But then the first Logic Showcase of the year came along with a prompt where this concept was a perfect and I just took the plunge.
I’m really happy I did, because I think the puzzle worked out much better than I could’ve hoped for and it’s given me the confidence to make more of these in the future.
This is a very challenging puzzle, even beyond just being very large and combining many different rulesets, so take your time. If you want a little warm-up, checkout Delightful Dice, a collection of 1x1x1 dice for each of these genres (except that Rail Pool is Partial instead of vanilla).
To get the answer check in Penpa, make sure you have drawn all line segments on the big die in green, with both copies of each segment that crosses an outer edge, and no line segments drawn on the six outer grids (which is something you’ll almost certainly want to do during the solve). I hope you’ll find the journey through this puzzle enjoyable and rewarding!
Rules: Place each of the six given grids on one face of the cube net and draw a single closed loop through the centres of some cells. The grids may be rotated but not reflected. The black die pips remain on the faces and cover any cell in that spot and cannot be visited by the loop. Ignore any clues covered by a die pip. Blue cells in all grids contain ice. The loop may not turn on icy cells. The loop may cross itself perpendicularly on icy cells, but nowhere else.
Dashed, coloured face edges and circled letters have no effect on the rules and simply indicate connectivity of the die net.
Castle Wall: Draw a loop through the centres of some cells. The loop may not enter clue 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. To trace a line from any white cell to any black cell, the loop must be crossed an odd number of times. Any die pip(s) on this face also fall under this rule.
Country Road: Draw a 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. Icy cells with a crossing are counted twice. On this face, orthogonally adjacent cells across a region border may not both be unused (unless one of them is covered by a die pip).
Ice Walk: Draw a loop through the centres of some cells which passes through each numbered cell. A number indicates how many cells make up the continuous non-icy section of the loop that the number is on. Such a section may extend to other die faces.
Mukkonn Enn: Draw a 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: Draw a loop through the centres of all 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 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. Die pips do not affect which regions are considered adjacent.
For Mukkonn Enn and Rail Pool: line length is measured through crossings and onto other die faces (the loop “bending” around the die from one face to another does not constitute a turn).