Schedule for Next Week
All the puzzles from last week have been grouped in this PDF.
And we now have a bonus video “talk-through” of the Friday Fillomino puzzle posted on our Patreon page here.
Next week we’ll be debuting a new puzzle style for all six days. What will it be? There might be a few more “easy” puzzles than usual, but with a new type it made sense to start out slow. The bonus puzzle for our high-level supporters will be a Consecutive Sudoku by Thomas Snyder.
Now that we’ve had a few weeks of a “variety one-week, focus on one style the next week” pattern, what do you think of our updated format?
Yep, that’s exactly how I did the puzzle. I guess I don’t need to post my walkthrough then!
And… Oooh, guessing game. Let’s take a guess on the new type…
I see Shikaku to be a fairly common puzzle that is not present yet. Also, Araf might be a nice uncommon genre to come into light. I’ll guess one of those two, but let’s see what the Grandmaster Puzzles team has in store…
Also, regarding variety/focus, probably you can choose somewhat uncommon types (including rare types, or possibly brand new types!) for focus to interest people, and put the common types in variety weeks? That’s my opinion, but the current one with pretty common focus types is already great.
I’m a little sad that I can’t play the guessing game on this one — I had a very nice run of guessing puzzle types in the early days of the site. But Patreon sponsors were already tipped off. I can say that it’s a puzzle type I generally like quite a bit.
True. Maybe I should set the guessing games up for the next completely new puzzle type in April or May. Chaotic is one out of two on interesting styles for that list.
Araf is a good suggestion – I think that is an interesting unique style as well.
I generally prefer the weeks with a single puzzle type – I found the upcoming one quite nice, and I feel that I have a stronger will to complete all the puzzles during a week if they are of the same/similar type.
Now that the first puzzle is out of the bag, this post seems a decent place to comment on Kurotto in general. (Context: I binged on all five puzzles when they arrived in the Patreon bundle.)
Hmmm. The form of the main constraint is neat, and of course – this being GM Puzzles – the week’s compositions have attractive arrangements of givens.
But, I don’t reckon this type will be a favorite of mine. I think it is because the solves that I enjoy the most involve interplay between local and global constraints – and Kurotto basically lacks the latter. (Nearby segments compete for space, but there’s no grid-spanning requirement such as connectedness or a need to involve every cell.)
That’s just personal taste, though. And I’m very glad that you continue to add new types to the set published here!
Yes, it’s true – I have done the Kurotto puzzles in a number of Nikoli magazines, and basically I found the same thing.
Although, for 10×10 puzzles, there is not such a big difference between global and local conditions, as a local condition can basically end up influencing the whole puzzle (such in the walkthrough example).
In this sense, Kurotto is similar to Nurikabe.
The closest puzzle type in my mind that we offer now is Fillomino. It too is 99+% local. The only global constraint is that sometimes numbers are so large things have to connect instead of making separate instances of the same thing. There will be an identical fringe case with Kurotto. As with Nanro that we posted a few times earlier this year, I don’t know if we will dive deep into Kurotto. But offering tastes of different puzzles from time to time (once every two months?) is probably what we will do this year.
I agree that Filomino is all about the interaction between nearby sections on a very similar scale to Kurotto. I guess the requirement that every cell of the grid be used and the consequent implied polyominos is what, for me, so far, makes it more interesting.
(However having gone through the Fillomino-fillia 2 puzzle pack recently, I know that I enjoy the variants which layer on additional constraints a lot more – if there are others new like me who haven’t seen that collection, wow, I can’t recommend it highly enough.)
I have little feel for composition, but I’d guess a adding a Nurikabe style global “ocean must connect” constraint to Kurotto would break many of the interesting interactions possible between givens?
But in any case I surely still appreciate having been introduced to this type this week. And it continues to amaze me how many pretty puzzles of every variety you grandmasters can create!
Would you think differently if Kurotto had an unshaded connectivity constraint? It might make for an interesting variant.
Ah, Kurotto. Why didn’t I think of it even though I testsolved Grant’s puzzle that is used for the example? Nice choice with a relatively new/rare type. And also being binary puzzle where you either shade a cell black or not, I definitely like it, as it’s easy to do on Paint. 😛