#147: Meandering Words (Loop)

Here is a variant of Meandering Words that’s been on my to-do list for quite a while. Of course, it involves a loop.

I’m a big fan of Meandering Words. Word genres in general provide some fantastic opportunities for puzzle themes, but most of the genres I’ve encountered so far I’ve not found very exciting in terms of the logic they provide. Meandering Words however has a lot of logical depth and variety. And while I still need to get better at constructing them, I have begun wondering about possible variants.

This one seems quite natural, and promising. We simply remove the regions and instead require that all the words can be joined into a loop. It’s a little harder to force things without too many givens because you lose the ability to place words of a certain length in certain places (at least easily), but it opens up a lot of new possibilities.

I wanted to leave a few thoughts here on further variations on this idea. First of all, while this puzzle uses every cell of the grid, that’s merely because the size of the wordlist matches the size of the grid, and like in Meandering Words there’s no reason to require that.

Secondly, Meandering Words sometimes has an additional clue type, where the location of the first letter in a region is shaded. The same could be done here (there are some shaded cells and a word must start there).

Furthermore, I was originally envisioning this as a path with the somewhat gimmicky requirement that it has to start on an S and end on an E. Of course that puts some heavy restrictions on the word list and isn’t really suitable for a reusable ruleset, so you’d probably want a different clue type to indicate start and end, but it could be fun for a one-off puzzle.

And finally, I’m sure you can do all sorts of shenanigans by combining this with other common loop/path variations, such as allowing crossings (which would reuse the letter in that cell).

One note about the puzzle below, answer check only looks for the letters, so you can use line mode to cross out the words in the list if you like. That said, I would generally expect puzzles in this ruleset to have a unique loop as well.

And just to be clear the cell in the centre is not a region, it’s a hole in the grid.