Broken Sign Blog
#162: Pentopia (Arrow Count)
30 March 2025It seems I have fallen a little behind with updating the blog. Here is a puzzle I made for a Logic Showcase back in October/November. I submitted three puzzles to the showcase, two of which ended up being tied for first place.
The prompt was to make puzzles with clues whose exact values are unknown but somehow restricted, such as Knapp Daneben or Even/Odd variants. Initially I wanted to pick a genre with non-numerical clues and made a Guide Arrow variant and this puzzle.
I believe Bryce Herdt originally came up with this Pentopia variant a long time ago and when GMPuzzles finally published it earlier last year they asked me to make the warmup puzzle for it. I really liked the ruleset and thought this would be a good opportunity to explore some trickier logic on a larger grid.
Rules: Shade some pentominoes of cells so that no pentominoes touch one another, not even diagonally. No two shaded pentominoes may be the same shape, counting rotations and reflections as the same. Clued cells cannot be shaded, and contain arrows indicating all of the orthogonal directions which tie for having a shaded cell appearing closest to the clued cell. At least one shaded cell must appear in the direction of an arrow.
Variant: Arrow Count — Only the number of arrows in each clue cell is given, not their directions.