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Saturday 17 September 2011

Puzzle #9: Star Battle; Clone

This Star Battle variant comes from the Dutch magazine Breinbrekers. This is probably the best source for star battle variants, as the genre was created for it. As for the name, Thomas Snyder was wonderin why there were no spaceships or lasers in this puzzle, but the name actually comes from the Dutch name for the Battle of the Network Stars TV-show.
Some of you might have seen this variant it in the LMI MAYnipulation test, for which I suggested this idea as it fit in very well with the test theme.

Rules:

Place 3 stars in every row, column and boldly marked area. All grids have the same solution. You'll need to use all grids to get to the solution.

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4 comments:

  1. Marcin Mucha18 September 2011 at 11:36

    Wow, this is crazy hard, have no clue how to solve this other than repeated TnE with some very limited logic :(

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  2. Valezius18 September 2011 at 12:12

    I was surprised that this puzzle wasnt too hard as most of puzzles on this blog :)
    This one easier than the puzzle in MAYnipulation.

    I saw the Star battle type (variation) on Tim Peeters' site in booklet4 for the first time:
    http://home.zonnet.nl/kostunix/booklet04.pdf

    The original name was Cattle. I think this is a very creativ name, and in hungary I use this name :)
    Stars within the fences? Pointless :)

    My second encounter was on the WPC in 2003 in the Netherlands. This new form (without numbers around the grid) is elenganter. But I didnt understand the puzzle's new name by this time :)

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  3. Para18 September 2011 at 22:55

    Well naming genres isn't always the easiest thing, because there isn't always a clear comparable concept behind it.

    Like on puzzlepicnic we had to give a name to the Myopia genre. Where I found the idea, there was no name given to it, so we still had to think of something. My first thought was Closer, because it's about where the loop is Closer and that you have to draw a Closed loop. When Maarten came up with the eye icons, I thought it was funny to call it nearsighted, like in the eye condition, as it was the nearest sight of the loop. Then we changed it to Myopia, which is the medical name for nearsightedness in English. In Dutch its name is the Dutch word for nearsighted. But Myopia is a somewhat nice sounding word, so I thought it was funny.

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  4. Anonymous28 November 2011 at 14:37

    Great puzzle. Fun (albeit slow) solve. Would not have wanted to see this one on a timed contest.
    Thanks.

    The Subro

    ReplyDelete