Sunday Update and Solutions
This past week’s set of Pentominous puzzles are collected in this PDF and the solutions are in this PDF. If you enjoyed this genre, there are many more Pentominous puzzles in our “Plenty o’ Pentominous” series as well as in the book Intro to GMPuzzles.
The daily solution videos are on the posts and also linked below. I was playing with a few different notation styles (lines, shading, letters, …) through the week on Penpa, and admit this is one of the puzzles where multiple defaults (and even multiple solution checking options) may be best. Please share your comments on how you prefer to solve Pentominous puzzles and if you could make this work in Penpa. We will probably document all of these methods when we formalize the user experience for this style and for Fillomino.
This upcoming week will feature Statue Park puzzles and will also include a large variation as a Sunday Stumper.
Finally, there are still some minor debugging and optimization steps happening with the fave/solve tracker after the most recent update, including trying to lengthen the time the login is stored. Please keep sharing your comments on how this is working and if all of the solving history has come over from the transfer to the site.
I’ve used lines, edges and coloring. But never actual letters, so for me it’s always the option I unchecked at the beginning. All in all, works very well imo. Thanks for another great week of puzzle
I used Composite -> Edge/Aux line (edgesub), which worked well and was quite convenient as I could place lines and edges without switching anything.
The Edge/Aux tool does seem to be a pretty good one for this style and Fillomino. Possibly still wanting a tab to numbers, but two interfaces at most. We will probably default to Edge/Aux as the mode the webpage loads into.
For Pentominous puzzles, I usually use line/color to mark the same pentomino piece.
For new fave/solve buttons, I find it hard to use when I’m solving previous LITS puzzles which require answer string on my phone. But every other puzzle type is working fine.
Specifically, those LITS puzzles before August 30, 2018.
I usually use my own program for this, since it allows me to customize the solving experience for each puzzle type, but my way of solving Pentominous (and Statue Park, and LITS, and even Fillomino) is entirely color-based. I’ve assigned a different color to each possible shape (or size, in the case of Fillomino), so e.g. X is magenta, F is red, etc.
For cases where I need to mark that some tiles go together, but don’t yet know their final shape, I just pick a placeholder color that I don’t think will cause a conflict in that area; if it ends up being a conflict after all, I’ll just pick a different one.