Broken Sign Blog
#138: Polish Puzzle Championship 2024 — Superposition
17 May 2024This is the second round I wrote for this year’s Polish Puzzle Championship. It was Round 5 (the last one) in the contest and designed to be a bit shorter than the other one. And, you guessed it, there’s a bonus puzzle.
After the other round I wrote was a genre-specific round, I wanted to go with a concept that would let me cover not only a variety of genres, but also all genre “categories”. The inspiration for the common variant came from a Logic Showcase puzzle back in 2022 by dpad (specifically a Double Choco). Each of these puzzles is actually two linked puzzles with the same clue layout, but you’re only given the sum of the values in each matching cell.
I think this is a neat variant idea for linked puzzles and I’d like to see more of these. There’s probably also other interesting things you can do with this, such as a Heyawake with different region layouts (but number clues in the same places), or just linking two puzzles of completely different genres.
A note about answer check, you basically only get a 50/50 chance of inputting the solutions in the same order that I did, and there’s not much to be done about that. But when you break in, try putting the smaller number in the left grid. If your break-in is the intended one that should generally give you the correct order. Also, except for the Skyscrapers, answer check does not care about the actual numbers.
And finally, as usual with these contest rounds, there’s an unused bonus puzzle at the end of this post (a Slitherlink). I don’t have a separate example puzzle for this one, because it was meant to be the example puzzle before I decided to switch to a different loop genre. But I hope by that point the variant concept is clear and you probably know or can figure out how Slitherlink works.
Rules: Enter a number into each dashed circle, such that the two numbers in matching circles sum to the number given in the middle grid. Then solve the left and right grid following the standard rules of the respective genre.
Rules: Place a number from 1 to N into each cell so that each row and column contains every number from that range with no repeats, where N is the side length of the grid. A clue outside the grid represents how many cells in the corresponding row or column contain a larger number than all cells before it in that row or column from the direction of the clue.
Rules: 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.
Rules: Divide the grid into regions of orthogonally connected cells. Two regions of the same size may not share an edge. Clued cells must belong to a region containing the indicated number of cells.
Rules: Shade some cells so that all areas of orthogonally connected shaded cells are rectangular and all areas of orthogonally connected unshaded cells are not rectangular. A clue represents the size of its group of shaded/unshaded cells.
Rules: Connect some pairs of orthogonally adjacent dots to form a single non-intersecting loop. Clues represent the number of edges drawn surrounding the clue (up to four).