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mathgrant wrote:

I'll admit that I was surprised by how solvable this puzzle was, despite not having an obvious starting point in the form of two adjacent copies of a single letter. I thought it'd be insanely tedious trial and error in typical PuzzlePicnic form, but I broke in and solved it without straining myself.

I had the exact same experience. I'd done the other 3 on my lunch break the day they first appeared, and when I got to this one I looked at it for a few seconds and dismissed it as not a lunch break puzzle.

Very nice puzzle.

Very nice! Looks like exactly the kind of puzzle that the 5th year anniversary competition asked for, with its antisymmetrical clues adding up to fives.

Number: Puzzle #2617
Genre: Tapa
Author: Bram
Appeared at: July 19, 2011

Ah, nothing like that jumped out at me. I'll have a look at it again some time later when I don't remember the solution anymore.

One thing I like about this genre is that there are so few standard tricks to solve standard situations, like you have in some puzzle types. At least, I haven't found many.

Very nice design!

And quite tough.

I had to break out the old pencil and paper because there was no way all the square counting I had to do was going to work out just in my head.

Number: Puzzle #2696
Genre: Heterocut
Author: xevs
Appeared at: June 20, 2011

Your alternative solution leaves the square directly above the 0 unilluminated.

Nice one!

This is a genre I just seem to be struggling with. In many puzzles I just can't find a logical solving path. With this one, I could! Woohoo!

Number: Puzzle #2702
Genre: Honey Islands
Author: xevs
Appeared at: May 29, 2011

I tripped up around the 5 in the middle initially.

Very pretty puzzle. A shame the symmetry broke with the top-right 6 and the bottom-left 8.

There's also the mouse wheel: rolling it backwards while on a cell will cycle through the values in reverse. Unfortunately, it'll also scroll the browser window down if it isn't already at the bottom of the page. (I don't know if it does this with all browsers, it does with IE.)

I'm not at all familiar with embedded applets, but if the applet could stop mousewheel input it catches from going to the containing object (the browser), that would be a great feature.

Edit: Whoa! I just tried the mousewheel thing and I noticed the numbers go as high as 55 now. Is that a recent change? That makes it a little awkard to get at 15 that way.

I only use the separators to imply that 2 squares need to have different numbers when at least 1 square doesn't have a number yet, but I connect all equally numbered squares to get a better sense of area cohesion.

That means I tend to use connectors a lot more than separators, so the way the mouse buttons are assigned sits well with me. It would be a different matter if connectors were automatically added between identical numbers, in which case I'd hardly ever have to manually draw a connector.

It doesn't really matter much anyway I suppose, the applet works well enough either way.

I can only add to the praise. Great design, and very enjoyable to solve.

Tough one, I had to resort to a lot of trial and error to solve it. It took me a lot of time because I kept making the same faulty leap of logic at a certain point after starting from scratch.

Very nice, great flow on this one.