Broken Sign Blog
#110: Meandering Words
26 June 2023Here is my last contest contribution for now. I made a single puzzle for a qualification round of the Slovak Puzzle Championship. The contest used a slightly easier version where the starting positions of some words were given, but I think the logic in this original version is quite nice and more suitable for the blog.
The word bank consists of the eight kraje, i.e. the administrative districts of Slovakia, or rather their capital cities (the kraje are simply named after their capital). After consultation with the contest coordinator Matej Uher, I decided to drop all diacritics, which makes the puzzle a little easier to solve for international solvers and helps drive the genre’s logic (which mainly plays off repeated letters).
Note that in Meandering Words, some cells may remain empty (which is not the case in the more popular Meandering Numbers).
Rules: Place a letter into some cells. The letters in a region must form an orthogonally connected chain of letters spelling out one of the words given outside the grid. Each given word must be used. Two instances of the same letter may not appear in adjacent cells, not even diagonally, and not even across region boundaries.