Total Masyu

[motris]

So, in a pre-preview of the USPC, which I expect will have a Masyu on it again this year, I thought I'd post a Masyu variant I was experimenting with over the weekend. The concept was suggested to me by rpipuzzleguy actually, and is a really good idea (although I still have my own Masyu variant ideas on the backburner for when/if I start to work on a logic

Comments

Nice variant

[garethmoore]

I really enjoyed these. Once you realise how the line must wiggle if there isn't a symbol there I'd say they are similar in difficulty to regular Masyu, except I imagine that actually making them is much trickier because of the way you need to make sure the 'wiggly bits' are forced to line up with each other as intended!?

Re: Nice variant

[motris]

There was a little bit of tweaking necessary on each of my initial "hard" designs to go from, say, 2 non-unique wiggles to a unique one. That often involved just adding in another circle somewhere to the path. But I think the general puzzles were as easy to construct as standard masyu as I had in mind what I wanted the loops to do and then just drew something that seemed to have blank cells where I wanted. Drawing a valid and somewhat minimal masyu with symmetric clues is probably actually harder, and I'm not sure I'd try symmetric black/white clues here.

[thedan]

For what it's worth, I found #3 more straightforward than #2... Although I was missing something silly on #2 for a while, so it might have been easier if I'd gotten over that hump more quickly.

[stigant]

mmm, its a bit hard to separate difficulty and unfamiliarity. Most things are easy once you know how to do them. I definitely took some techniques from 2 to 3, but I also found that with a higher density of dots, the 3rd puzzle had more standard masyu deductions than the 2nd

[stigant]

of course, since you can't remove any dots, it might be trivial to just find the spots that each pentomino can occupy via pattern recognition.

[motris]

My difficulty ratings for these were based on the "newness" of rules you'd need for them, and 2/3 seemed to have two different kinds of rules to use in places although 3 is more masyu-like in the sense of using global loop closure rules

Catching up on some of your older stuff ...

[thesubro]

Very nice variation. Would enjoy more if the wiggling can be kept fresh. Thanks.

TheSubro