Broken Sign Blog
#144: Masyu (Mosaic)
28 May 2024This was my third and final entry in Logic Showcase 53, “The Outsiders”. This and the previous puzzle were tied for second place.
For this last puzzle, I wanted to do something wacky, where the outside clues referred to something really unusual. The 2x2 Masyu is a bit of a meme on Discord, so I was wondering whether I could make a puzzle out of placing 2x2 Masyu patches on a grid.
My first attempt used slightly different rules where the 2x2 patches could overlap. I made an example puzzle for those rules but decided not to pursue them further at that point and gave it another go with the rules you see in this post.
For the actual puzzles below, answer check looks for the loop and the shaded cells (not the circles).
Rules: Place some non-overlapping 2x2 tiles with white and black circles to form a Masyu grid and solve the Masyu. Cells which are not part of any tile should be shaded and the loop cannot pass through them.
Masyu rules: Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centres of some cells that passes through every circle. The loop must turn on black circles and travel straight through the cells on either side. The loop must go straight through white circles, and turn in at least one of the cells on either side.
Mosaic rules: Clues outside the grid represent the tiles seen in the corresponding row or column, in order. Tiles cover two rows and columns and will be seen in both of them. A question mark represents one tile with an arbitrary configuration of circles. An asterisk represents any number of arbitrary tiles, including none at all.
