#130: New Genre — Bramble

7 January 2024

I’ve created a new genre and would you believe it, it doesn’t involve drawing loops or even paths. This post introduces the genre with a small example puzzle and three larger puzzles of increasing difficulty.

There is a bit of a story to how this genre came about. I shared a Heyawake by Japanese user poison_island on Discord. Another user didn’t notice the “Heyawake” part and thought this was a genre called “Poison Island” they weren’t familiar with and tried to figure out the rules purely from the error messages.

After the confusion was cleared up they challenged everyone to come up with rules, different from Heyawake, that would result in a unique solution for the same puzzle. I started from Cocktail Lamp and added a few more or less reasonable rules until I indeed ended up with a working puzzle. The final ruleset was a bit contrived, but I felt that a few of the rules combined to create some interesting structures.

So I iterated on the rules a bit and made a few more puzzles to experiment with them, which finally resulted in Bramble. As usual, the rules are at the bottom of the post, but I’ll copy them here for reference:

Shade some blocks of one or two cells such that no two blocks are orthogonally adjacent and no block crosses a region boundary. All blocks form a diagonally connected network without loops. Two blocks which touch diagonally cannot both be single cells. Number clues indicate the amount of shaded cells in their region.

And here is a small example puzzle which you can also solve on Penpa+:

Below you’ll find three puzzles exploring a variety of logic in the genre. They get gradually harder (and smaller). And before anyone wastes time on it, no the first puzzle does not work as a Square Jam relay if you remove the regions (but it would if the bottom left 2 were moved one cell to the right).