Broken Sign Blog
#139: Pentominous (L-Shaped)
26 May 2024I have fallen a little behind on sharing my Logic Showcase entries on the blog. Time to do some catching up. This is one of two puzzles I made for LS50, “Taking the L”, all the way back in September.
The prompt here was to make region division puzzles with the variant that all regions have to be “L-Shaped”. This is not meant in the strict sense of a genre like Sashigane but in the sense used in Aho-ni-Narikire, i.e. each region must be formed by taking a rectangle and removing a smaller rectangle (along both dimensions) from one corner. Or in other words, each region must be a hexagon.
For this puzzle, I was quite surprised that I was able to find a solution at all and it ended up being mostly a matter of finding a way to clue it that was on theme and resulted in a reasonable solve path.
Rules: Divide the grid into regions of five orthogonally connected cells so that no two regions of the same shape share an edge, counting rotations and reflections as the same. Clued cells must belong to a region with the pentomino shape associated with that letter.
Variant: L-Shaped — All regions must have exactly six sides.