Tuesday 20 September 2011

Double Trouble #2: Country Road and Ripple Effect

Here is number two. I was happy this worked. I'm hoping people are surprised this was possible as the 2 genres aren't even close to having the same rules. This one did cause me a lot of trouble creating in the first few tries. Both puzzle types have their uniqueness issues and they are not really always fixable in the same way while keeping the design. But it worked out in the end, keeping the designed paths nicely

Rules for Country Road

Rules for Ripple Effect

Firstly the puzzle can be solved as a Country Road puzzle. I don't think it's too hard, but there might be some struggling points in the middle.
Secondly it can be solved as a Ripple Effect puzzle. This puzzle is a bit harder especially towards the end.

7 comments:

  1. Haha, I am waiting for the day when you make an entire contest in a single diagram :) Together perhaps with "guess with puzzle is not there" or sth.

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  2. I actually thought this idea would make a good test, but then unannounced. And then when people would print the booklet with 2 puzzles per page, they'd see the same puzzle twice per page. But as I've now started posting these puzzles here, I think the element of surprise is gone. It also might have had the problem of people posting and losing time about how there's something wrong with the puzzle booklet as puzzles are duplicated.

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  3. It still is a good idea to have a puzzle contest with same grids. It will be surprising to many.

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  4. Simpsons did it. :-b

    I mean, this is two very nice puzzles, especially considering it's two types I don't see that often. But I wanted to point out that I'd done something similar, twice, over a year previous: http://cyrebjr.livejournal.com/22064.html and http://cyrebjr.livejournal.com/22599.html .

    Of course, this is the first time I've looked back on those puzzles in a while (did I really put a 9 theme in that first one, and was it by accident?), so I'm left wondering if I can do it again/if someone else can do something similar/if perhaps some given digits would help the setup.

    (Since I somehow couldn't figure out how to mention this in the middle: I'm going backwards through these puzzles. They're all great, except I can't figure out how to start #13: Island.)

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  5. Thanks for those posts. They are nice puzzles. Clever combination with the shaded squares.

    As for puzzle #13: Remember that you have to form a single Island. The clues don't allow this easily.

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  6. ...Well, yeah, but I don't know how to solve a typical puzzle either. I went through the sample, and it requires some reasoning that's really new to me.

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  7. That's what I liked about the genre actually. that some of the required logic is different from other genres.

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