Friday Puzzle #33 - 2010 Block Puzzle Party
Welcome back to motris.livejournal.com, where it's New Year's every Friday. At some point I'm sure you all will get tired (or probably already are) with the 2010 theming of puzzles but its a good exercise for me as I learn how to construct some new types and accomplish some fun/challenging things with more familiar ones.
This week I feature a puzzle whose Nikoli English name I was not immediately familiar with. Finding their Rules page (in Japanese) suggests it is called "Block Puzzle" from the url. I've recently been solving many of this type in the context of the Giants Best Selection 2 (7-12). It seems to me, having solved all the puzzles there, that the best puzzles of this type use a single group of between 7 and 10 symbols, with ~2-3 of these symbols repeated in the group. Obviously, "HAPPY 2010" fits this apparent criteria really well so I attempted such a construction with a big embedded HAPPY 2010 in the individual characters as shown below. Enjoy!
Rules: Divide the grid into groups of connected characters (each must be connected to at least one other character in the group horizontally or vertically) such that each group contains exactly the nine characters in HAPPY2010 (including 2 P's and 2 0's). Every letter/number will appear in exactly one group.
20:14 (shoot, I made the puzzle 4 seconds too hard!)
This week I feature a puzzle whose Nikoli English name I was not immediately familiar with. Finding their Rules page (in Japanese) suggests it is called "Block Puzzle" from the url. I've recently been solving many of this type in the context of the Giants Best Selection 2 (7-12). It seems to me, having solved all the puzzles there, that the best puzzles of this type use a single group of between 7 and 10 symbols, with ~2-3 of these symbols repeated in the group. Obviously, "HAPPY 2010" fits this apparent criteria really well so I attempted such a construction with a big embedded HAPPY 2010 in the individual characters as shown below. Enjoy!
Rules: Divide the grid into groups of connected characters (each must be connected to at least one other character in the group horizontally or vertically) such that each group contains exactly the nine characters in HAPPY2010 (including 2 P's and 2 0's). Every letter/number will appear in exactly one group.
20:14 (shoot, I made the puzzle 4 seconds too hard!)