#143: Choco Crossies

This was the second puzzle I made for Logic Showcase 53, “The Outsiders”. This and the next puzzle were tied for second place (coming in only 0.01 points behind the winner).

The idea here was fairly simple, just replace the regular clues in Choco Banana with Cross the Streams clues. I think this worked out pretty well and is worth exploring further (or maybe Coral clues).

Still not sure how I feel about all the pointless stars I included. I went back and forth on that before submitting the puzzle but ultimately decided it looked nicer this way.

Example

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.

Variant: Outside Clues — Clues outside the grid represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the corresponding row or column, in order. A question mark represents one block of an unknown number of cells. An asterisk represents any number of blocks of shaded cells, including none at all.

Main Puzzle