Broken Sign Blog
#166: Forest Walk
8 May 2025While looking through my unpublished puzzles, I found a prototype for another Walk ruleset. I still liked the concept when revisiting the puzzle, so I made a few more.
I should’ve seen this coming when I made Water Walk and Fire Walk, but those have led to a proliferation of Walk genres on Discord (especially in the Cracking the Cryptic server) and even an entire set of original rulesets for EnigMarch by TwoHoleStraw. One of the rulesets from the CtC server was an Arbor Walk by kinoseidon, which inspired me to make this Forest Walk. The hope was to end up with solutions that are reminiscent of a map of branching forest trails, which I think mostly succeeded.
I was afraid that the forest patches would be huge uniqueness nightmares, but these puzzles have been surprisingly forgiving in their construction. There are some interesting parity constraints on the branches, and the way neighbouring branches interact tends to give just enough structure to resolve them without too much trouble (usually).
The first puzzle below is an example with solution, the other three are the original prototype (which serves as a nice introduction) followed by two new puzzles which are a bit trickier.
Rules: Draw a single connected network of lines through the centres of some cells. The network branches in a T-shape at every forest cell it visits and never on normal cells. There are no dead ends or four-way branches/crossings. A number indicates how many cells make up the continuous non-forest section of the network that the number is on.
