Tuesday Teaser #9: Ripple Road
Last month, I posted a chimera for a Tuesday Teaser, but it wasn't very difficult. This week, I'd say I'm fixing that by combining two puzzle types I have never constructed before. Here are the rules for each individually:
Country Road
Draw a path through orthogonally adjacent squares that visits each outlined region once. (Mellow Melon uses a variation whereby a room may be skipped, but I decided against that.) Some squares within a region might not be visited. If two orthogonally adjacent squares are from different regions, at least one must be visited. Finally, if a region contains a clue number, that number says how many squares are visited within the region.
Ripple Effect
Fill each square with a number so that each outlined region contains each of the numbers from 1 to its size exactly once. When two of the same number N are in the same row or column, they must be separated by at least N squares (which is to say that the squares' centers must be more than distance N apart). That is, you can't have sequences like 11, 2x2, 3xx3, etc., but you can have 1x1, 1xx1, 2xx2, 2xxx2, 3xxxxx3, etc. Some squares may be filled in at the start.
At first, I had thought about putting the clues in directly, which would make this another chimera. But it occurred to me that in each region, exactly one of the digits in the Ripple Effect answer would match the clue number for that region in Country Road. So I decided to omit clue numbers completely, and instead shade the one square in each region where they matched.
(EDIT: Since no one has responded to this yet, I'm hoping this is because the puzzle is intimidating. I assure you, each puzzle type is quite safe on its own. If you're having trouble putting both a number and a road segment inside a square, I suggest putting the number in the upper left corner and relegating road sections to the other three corners.)
In other news, at 5:10 PM (EDT, I believe) on Saturday the 10th, I officially signed up for Fur Affinity. I plan to use the account to do more than lurk, to put up pieces that I don't think fit here. (No, I'm not telling you my account name. Where's the fun in that?)
Country Road
Draw a path through orthogonally adjacent squares that visits each outlined region once. (Mellow Melon uses a variation whereby a room may be skipped, but I decided against that.) Some squares within a region might not be visited. If two orthogonally adjacent squares are from different regions, at least one must be visited. Finally, if a region contains a clue number, that number says how many squares are visited within the region.
Ripple Effect
Fill each square with a number so that each outlined region contains each of the numbers from 1 to its size exactly once. When two of the same number N are in the same row or column, they must be separated by at least N squares (which is to say that the squares' centers must be more than distance N apart). That is, you can't have sequences like 11, 2x2, 3xx3, etc., but you can have 1x1, 1xx1, 2xx2, 2xxx2, 3xxxxx3, etc. Some squares may be filled in at the start.
At first, I had thought about putting the clues in directly, which would make this another chimera. But it occurred to me that in each region, exactly one of the digits in the Ripple Effect answer would match the clue number for that region in Country Road. So I decided to omit clue numbers completely, and instead shade the one square in each region where they matched.
(EDIT: Since no one has responded to this yet, I'm hoping this is because the puzzle is intimidating. I assure you, each puzzle type is quite safe on its own. If you're having trouble putting both a number and a road segment inside a square, I suggest putting the number in the upper left corner and relegating road sections to the other three corners.)
In other news, at 5:10 PM (EDT, I believe) on Saturday the 10th, I officially signed up for Fur Affinity. I plan to use the account to do more than lurk, to put up pieces that I don't think fit here. (No, I'm not telling you my account name. Where's the fun in that?)