Puzzle No. 512: Kurotto

Since I’ve just been back here recently, I should note that sometimes, I won’t be posting “fresh” puzzles. Mostly this is because I also want to use the blog to organize some of these puzzles better.

I have been participating in “speedsetting” contests lately over on the CTC discord server. I’ve seen that this may seem unappealing to some more experienced puzzlemakers, but honestly, its a lot of fun. Also, mostly it allows me to put together something without overthinking about “where will it get published” and “what are the requirements”, while being in a limited time setting that makes me “feel” like I am doing something different.

What about the quality of the puzzle then? I’ll let you be the judge, with today’s puzzle, which is from a speedsetting event that took place just 6 or 7 hours ago. The constraints given were to construct a Kurotto with the only clues being in sets of 3 orthogonally connected cells, of the same shape (allowing for rotations and reflections). Basically, either a puzzle with only L trimino sets of clues or a puzzle with only I trimino sets of clues. The time given was 40 minutes but I forgot about it and joined late. Fortunately, its Kurotto, probably as comfortable for me as Tapa, so I could whip this up in 5-6 minutes. It won 2nd place!

I have more puzzles from earlier speedsetting contests that I’ll be posting in the future, but for now, here is the Kurotto!

Rules: Shade some cells so that each circled number represents the total count of shaded cells in connected groups sharing an edge with that number. Cells with circles cannot be shaded.

Link to solve on Penpa: https://git.io/JRqze

Puzzle No. 474 : Kurotto

Umm..

Rules.

Rated – Medium.

Enjoy!

Yay.

P474

Puzzle No. 429 : Kurotto

This was supposed to be yesterday’s puzzle but I was pretty tired after conducting 3 events within the Chennai Brain Games, so posting it now. Tomorrow I’ll be home, and once home I’ll hopefully finally be able to post something about all that has gone on in the past week. In the meantime, if anyone has any feedback/thoughts about the Sudoku/Puzzle events of yesterday, feel free to post it here. 

Today’s puzzle, I rate as hard, but if you’re familiar with Island puzzles, this is probably easier. But I think its hard for those who aren’t used to the logic.

Rules for Kurotto

Rated : Hard.

P429

Puzzle No. 375 : Kurotto

Earlier this year, there was a contest on Tawan’s blog called Nikoli Hurdles. There were 8 Nikoli puzzles placed as hurdles for the participants, with the entrants who submitted all answers correctly then participating in an online randomized rock, paper, scissors game. The results of that are here. I received my prize a week ago now I think, and there’s 2 new-ish (I’d seen a few before the book, but not that many) genres on here, both of which I like. One of these is Kurotto. So I thought I’d create a Kurotto for the blog. I’ll let you be the judge of how good it is. On a difficulty scale here, it’d be a medium, but on Nikoli’s difficulty scale I see it being rated with a crying face.

Anyway,

Rules for Kurotto – Shade in some cells in the grid. Circled cells cannot be shaded. The number in a circle is the total number of shaded cells in the shaded cell groups that are orthogonally touching the circled cell. In other words, traveling through only shaded cells orthogonally, the circled cell must be able to reach as many shaded cells as its number indicates. Other instances of this puzzle have cells with blank circles too, which play no part except for being cells that can’t be shaded.

If that wasn’t clear or you want to see an example, here is the Nikoli version of the rules.

Enjoy!

P375