#088: Numbered Snake

A month or two ago, I made a whole bunch of practice puzzles to prepare for the qualification round for this year’s Logic Masters. The puzzles were all a bit rushed, because I had to get through almost 30 genres in a couple of weeks, but there were two constructions I was particularly happy with that I’ve been meaning to put up on the blog.

This is the first of them, a Snake variation where the cells along the snake are numbered instead of just being shaded. Answer check accepts either shading or numbers.

Rules: Shade some cells to form a non-intersecting path which does not touch itself, not even diagonally. The cells along the path are consecutively numbered from 1 to N, where N is the length of the path. White circles must lie somewhere along the path and their number must match the number on the path. A number outside the grid represents how many cells in the corresponding row or column are shaded. Cells containing “–” cannot be shaded.