Tuesday 30 April 2013

Puzzle #160: Fillomino

This puzzle was written as a birthday present to Zuzana Hromcova. Matus Demiger contacted numerous authors to make a puzzle for her birthday to create a set of 18 puzzles for her 18th birthday. This is my puzzle. It's a standard Fillomino. I think the theming should be clear to everyone. The red numbers have no special meaning for the solve, but you can probably figure out why they are red. I really like how the solve turned out. I hope Zuzana enjoyed it.

Rules for Fillomino


Click to enlarge

5 comments:

  1. Nice logic at the end of the solve. I was a little slow to get started, until I noticed that some of the hints that looked far apart were still able to 'influence' each other.

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    1. I often like to place two digits N N steps apart. That way they can never join but still get close enough to influence eachother.

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  2. How on Earth did you hold off on the red digits being useful until the end? When I preplace clues, I have to make deductions based on them before I can figure out what the other clues should be.

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    1. From my experience, I use your approach sometimes and at other times I put down the "theming" clues first, but build from elsewhere because the theme itself might not give me the start I want to put into the puzzle. Maybe thats what Bram's done here.

      Another possibility is, sometimes, while re-solving a puzzle after creating, you might find an error and have to change things, which can sometimes lead to a complete change in solve path which you can still be happy with.

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    2. The reason is actually really simple. I couldn't see any way to create an opening there. Too much space to force the 2 or 4s to do anything useful. And I could place some nice 3 and 4 patterns in the bottom, so I figured i'd work out the top near the end. Most of the construction was trying to work out how to get the top unique, I still had a lot of space to fill. That's why I had the 9. I don't normally go for digits that high in Fillomino.

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