Puzzle No. 517-519: Nikoli! (Tribute to Maki Kaji)

I haven’t posted in a while. There are a bunch of reasons for this, including travel and a bad reaction to my first vaccine dose.

Anyway, today’s post is a tribute to Maki Kaji, who passed away last week from cancer. I was going to elaborate on my thoughts more, but honestly this post by Thomas pretty much says exactly what I wanted to, perhaps in a better way.

I got into Nikoli.com pretty late, and just had a year of solving before the online solving portion had to close. I do purchase their books from time to time and I absolutely love the giants series.

Like Thomas, my note of thanks will be for his broader contribution to the puzzle community via Nikoli, influencing me and so many other puzzlers positively.

As a tribute, I have written 3 Nikoli style puzzles, and by that I mean ‘Nikoli style’ – I’ve tried to keep look, difficulty and dimensions as I remember them from Nikoli.com.

Rules:

Akari:

1. Place light bulbs (circles) according to the following rules.
2. Light bulbs may be placed in any of the white squares, the number in the square shows how many light bulbs are next to it, vertically and horizontally.
3. Each light bulb illuminates from bulb to black square or outer frame in its row and column.
4. Every white square must be illuminated and a light bulb can not illuminate another light bulb.

Shakashaka:

1. Place black “triangles in squares” (see 2) in the grid under the following rules.
2. There are four kinds of black triangles you can put in the squares (shown below)
   . You cannot place black triangles in the black squares.
3. The parts of the grid that remain white (uncovered by black triangles) always form a rectangle or a square.
4. The numbers indicate how many black triangles are around it, vertically and horizontally.

Heyawake:

1. A rectangle, bordered by bold lines, is called a “room”. Fill in cells under the following rules.
2. The numbers indicate how many painted cells there are in a room. Rooms with no number may have any number of painted cells.
3. White cells cannot stretch across more than two rooms in a straight line.
4. Painted cells cannot be connected horizontally or vertically. White cells must not be separated by painted cells.

Rule credits: https://www.nikoli.co.jp/en/puzzles/index.html

Penpa links

P517: https://git.io/J0aKg

P518: https://git.io/J0aP0

P519: https://git.io/J0a1f

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  P517

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  P518

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  P519

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Puzzle No. 510: Akari

So… I’m back.

I wondered what I could possibly say along with starting to post here after such a long hiatus (from here anyway).

I do plan to start posting here regularly again though. Why? I guess we may or may not find out.

So after a lot of thought on what to post as my return puzzle, I decided, I just want to keep things simple.

So here’s a vanilla Akari.

Rules:

Place lights in some cells so that every cell is illuminated. Lights illuminate the cell they’re in as well as all cells seen in a straight line horizontally or vertically, not obstructed by a black cell. Lights may not illuminate each other. Clues represent the number of lights in the (up to) four cells surrounding the clue.

We have penpa links now! Why penpa over some other platforms for this blog? I’ll probably write about that in a future post. I’ll also write about someone doing some nice work to make links out of some of the older puzzles of this blog. All that and more to come. For now, link to solve: https://git.io/JBSYU

The link is set to composite mode specialized towards solving Akari, and drawing in the bulbs correctly will trigger the answer check.

Puzzle No. 442 : Akari

This was kinda meant to be my Sunday puzzle, but, ah well…

Anyway,

Rules for Akari.

Rated – Medium maybe.

Enjoy!

 

P442

Puzzle No. 381 : Akari

Here’s a random, little-more-than-easy Akari that has mainly one common enough deduction used throughout. Why am I posting it now? Because I had discarded it from a recent bunch of newspaper puzzles (the thinking behind this being that that one deduction is still a bit much for the newspaper audience), so it was just lying around, and because I was about to post an entire puzzle set just now, but I suddenly realized I’m feeling too sleepy to go through with it. So, here’s a quick little puzzle, and I’ll post the said puzzle set (15 puzzles in all) tomorrow once I wake up.

Akari Rules.

Enjoy!

P381

Puzzle No. 351 – 366 : Zagreb Open puzzles

I managed to somehow squeeze this set out in one day just before my exams started, right in the middle of the hectic submissions time in college. After that, Vladimir managed to squeeze in some time on that day itself to test these puzzles, so many thanks to him for that.

Rules all placed at the start of the post with the puzzles coming later (Trying a new format for posting, simply because its more convenient for me. The puzzle captions should aid you in knowing which rule is for what puzzle, but the ordering is the same as well, so it shouldn’t be much hassle either way.

Rules –

351 – Akari.

352 – Fillomino.

353 – Graffiti Snake.

354 – Heyawake.

355 – Japanese Sums – Place the digits 1-6 in some of the squares, so that no digit is repeated in any row or column. Sums on the outside indicate the sums of consecutive digits in that row or column, in order. Each sum is seperated by at least one empty square.

356 – LITS.

357 – Nanro – Write numbers in some cells of the diagram. All numbers in a region must be equal. The given number in a region denotes how many cells in this region contain a number (at least one). Same numbers must not be orthogonally adjacent across region boundaries. Numbered cells must not cover an area of size 2×2 or larger. All numbered cells must form a single orthogonally continuous area..

358 – Odd Even Skyscraper – In addition to Skyscraper rules linked to below, all outside clues that are shaded are odd. The rest are even. Range 1-6.

359 – Pentopia.

360 – Regional Yajilin.

361 – Shakashaka.

362 – Skyscrapers. Range 1-6.

363 – Tapa.

364 – Tents – Place a tent ortogonally next to each tree so that no two tents touch eachother, not even diagonally. Numbers on the outside indicate the amount of tents that are in that row or column.

365 – Walls Fillomino – Some region borders are given; i.e. the numbers on both sides must be different.

366 – Yajisan Kazusan.

Enjoy!

P351

P352

P353

P354

P355

P356

P357

P358

P359

P360

P361

P362

P363

P364

P365

P366

Puzzle No. 316 – 336 : Polish Championship set

I’d mentioned a few posts earlier, that I’d contributed some puzzles to the Polish Championships this year. There was an offline qualifier, an online qualifier, the finals, and the playoffs. I think there was a good share of my puzzles in all 4 of these rounds. Its pretty confusing which was used where, since I’ve not organized it that well in my folders, so I’ll just post all the themed ones together (as mentioned in that post linked to above, the online qualifier had puzzles that I used simultaneously elsewhere and were more of a hurried solution).

The theme I was working on should be pretty obvious on seeing all the puzzles. It started with the easier Tapa, which I made completely by accident while writing a bunch of newspaper puzzles, and then I just tried a similar thing with the Corral and that happened quickly too. So, just decided to go along with it, discarded those two from the newspaper bunch and started off the Polish set with them. I couldn’t really try and retry the puzzles to get the exact appearances I wanted, and this is apparent from the 2 LITS and the Killer Sudoku among other ones. The LITS is of course something difficult that I set myself to do in a pretty short timespace, as both LITS were required hurriedly for the qualifiers, and to make it have duplicated regions throughout on the first try seems almost impossible, at least for me.

Anyway, here they are. As with the Zeka set, rules are either linked to by the puzzle names or just added here. These puzzles have varying difficulties, but I don’t think anything was exceptionally hard.

Enjoy!

P316 – ABC Box – Fill the grid with letters A, B and C. The clues outside give the sequence of letters in that row or column. If the clue is a number, that is the number of times a letter appears in that position of the sequence (Which letter is determined while solving). If the clue is a letter then that letter appears in that position of the sequence (The number of times it appears continuously is determined while solving). A “?” means that an unknown letter is appearing an unknown number of times in that position of the sequence.

P316

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P317  : Akari.

P317

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P318 : Corral.

P318

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P319 : Country Road.

P319

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P320, 321 : Fillomino.

P320

P321

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P322 : Heyawacky.

P322

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P323 : Killer Sudoku 8×8 – Follow regular sudoku rules. Additionally, the numbers at the top left of a cage gives the sum of numbers in that cage. Numbers cannot repeat in a cage.

P323

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P324, 325 : LITS

P324

P325

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P326 : Masyu

P326

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P327 : Pentasight

P327

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P328 : Pentopia

P328

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P329, 330 : The Persistence of Memory

P329

P330

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P331 : Regional Yajilin

P331

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P332, 333 : Tapa

P332

P333

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P334 : Tapa Skyscrapers

P334

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P335 : Yajilin

P335

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P336 : Yajisan Kazusan

P336

Puzzle No. 170 : Akari

Rasteparticram Teerpotasda!

Rules for Akari

Rated : Hard-ish. Just a bit above medium.

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 170

 

 

Puzzle No. 143 : Akari

Rules for Akari

Rated : Medium maybe.

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 143

 

Puzzle No. 126 : Akari

What’s going through my brain right now – hiasjfvoreeutosamcoasngfis.

Yes, that. Exactly that.

Rules for Akari.

Rated : Medium.

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 126

 

Puzzle No. 102 : Akari [true-false pairs]

I have an exam tomorrow, and I’m going a bit crazy. Mostly the day’s been crap and my brain’s been haywire. Also, this is the 3rd Akari variant I’ve thought up today. First I thought up something that I happened to run into here just after thinking of it. I then thought of 1 with knight pieces, and happened to visit Zoltmeister’s blog where the pictures have wonderfully re-appeared, so I only now noticed that he’s already somewhat used that one too(when the pictures weren’t there, I didn’t really give the blog an extensive look. My bad). I really wanted one for myself today, so, quite simply, I’ve not visited a blog since then, and don’t really care if this one’s already been thought of. Its mine here and now *stubborn kid* I really hope this is a good one.

Rules :

This is an Akari where for every pair of adjacent numbered cells, one is true and one is false. The false one must be replaced either by a light, or your average number-less light blocking black cell. The true one acts as a normal Akari clue. Determine which is which and solve the puzzle using regular Akari rules.

Rated : Medium, because honestly, I confused myself completely while solving this one. But I’ve already written above about my state currently, so won’t be surprised if its a bit easier than I think.

Solution here. Password – AM

Enjoy!

Puzzle No. 102