#15: Cave

 Standard Cave rules.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#14: Takeoff (Masyu)

 Standard Masyu rules.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#13: Aqre

Rules

Standard Aqre rules.

Difficulty: [★★★☆☆]

Solve on PuzzleSquare (puzz.link)

#12: Clueless Heyajilin

While we're on the topic of Yajilin combos, here's a recent one. I hadn't seen this one before, and the interaction is quite fun even without the clues. Enjoy!

Rules

Standard Heyawake+Yajilin rules. In case you're not familiar, here's the breakdown (simplified for the lack of clues):

• Shade some cells in the grid. No two shaded cells may be orthogonally adjacent.
• There cannot be a horizontal or vertical line of unshaded cells that goes through 2 or more region borders.
• Also, draw a single non-intersecting loop that goes through all unshaded cells.

Difficulty: ★★★☆☆

Solve in Penpa

Solve on PuzzleSquare (via Penpa)

#11: Vertigo Yajilin (bonus)

I can't really complete this mini-series without an epilogue of sorts. =)

For the 2024 CtC Secret Santa event, about two months after I was done posting my Vertigo puzzles, I received a gift puzzle that was a nice combo of Vertigo and Yajilin. The author Piatato never really released the gift puzzle itself, but they recently published a similar one on LMD, to very positive responses. I invite you to browse Piatato's LMD page for lots of quality original puzzles.

After receiving such a sweet gift, I knew I had to try and set this one myself. The experience was nerve-wrecking, and the resulting puzzle is (and I'm not putting this as a spoiler, as a cautionary measure) really hard. I encourage you to go through the Vertigo series (1, 2, 3), and also Piatato's puzzle above before you try this one. Have fun!

Oh, and on the topic of Secret Santa, I'd like to eventually post about the gift I made myself. It's quite a bit to unpack though, and I'm not ready to do another series just yet. =) There's always the future though, and in the meantime stay tuned and enjoy!

Rules

Shade some cells so that no two shaded cells are orthogonally adjacent. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the number of shaded cells in a straight line in the indicated direction.

Draw a single loop travelling orthogonally through the centers of all empty cells. The loop may visit some cells twice, but must travel straight through such cells each time. The loop can not otherwise self-overlap or self-intersect.

While travelling along the loop, all 90 degree turns must have the same direction (all left or all right).

Difficulty: [★★★★⯪]

Solve in Penpa

#10: Vertigo Part 3: Expert

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

These are the last and the hardest puzzles I have in my Vertigo backlog. I encourage you to try easier puzzles in earlier posts if haven't done them yet. Help yourself to spoilers in square brackets, [like this].

Rules

Draw a single loop travelling orthogonally through the centers of all empty cells. The loop may visit some cells twice, but must travel straight through such cells each time. The loop can not otherwise self-overlap or self-intersect.
While travelling along the loop, all 90 degree turns must have the same direction (all left or all right).

#9: Vertigo Part 2: Advanced

Part 1 here

Let's continue with Vertigo, getting into slightly harder territory. Spoilers (hints and difficulty estimates) are hidden in square brackets, [like this].

Quick reminder about the

Rules

Draw a single loop travelling orthogonally through the centers of all empty cells. The loop may visit some cells twice, but must travel straight through such cells each time. The loop can not otherwise self-overlap or self-intersect.
While travelling along the loop, all 90 degree turns must have the same direction (all left or all right).

#8: Vertigo Part 1: Beginner

 (Hi folks from LMD!)

Someone recently mentioned that most puzzles in this blog so far are hard. This gives me an excuse to start a mini-series about Vertigo, my favourite genre I created to date. I'd worked on it quite a bit, so the puzzles will be broken down into three posts, in increasing difficulty, to hopefully provide a reasonable learning curve. Ironically this is almost the reverse of chronological order, as it took me quite a few attempts to make properly easy puzzles with this ruleset.

I'll try to provide spoilered hints (in square brackets [like this]) whenever I feel like there's a possibility of getting stuck.

All puzzles to be featured are already on the Kudamono page (many thanks to Pedro for implementing the genre!), and I'm also gradually uploading them to PuzzleSquare.

Rules

Draw a single loop travelling orthogonally through the centers of all empty cells. The loop may visit some cells twice, but must travel straight through such cells each time. The loop can not otherwise self-overlap or self-intersect.
While travelling along the loop, all 90 degree turns must have the same direction (all left or all right).

Here's a small example by Pedro:

Solve in Penpa

Solve in Kudamono

#7: Snake Egg Shikaku (CtC SSC entry)

A speed setting competition at CtC Discord has just ended. It was my first setting competition, and it was loads of fun. I'm usually a slow-and-steady kind of setter, so I wasn't sure I would be able to finish in time to start with, but I ended up doing alright... well, kinda lol.

The prompt for the competition was to create a snake egg puzzle (rules, for example, here) with a twist, within an hour's time. Not much constraint, plenty of room for creativity. It took about twenty minutes for me to realise that my first idea doesn't work at all, and then it was panic mode. I still managed to come up with an alternative idea and get it working (with a lot of duct tape, so to speak), and even had enough time left to test it. It had a couple of issues though.

First, the puzzle doesn't really have much to do with snake egg per se, as there's no mutual constraint on empty regions. What's worse, however, is that I neglected to read the rules properly and set a 13x13 grid, while the rules had forbidden anything larger than a 9x9. Naturally I was raring to go as fast as possible... who knew elementary-school reading and counting would be my downfall.

Despite being illegal, the puzzle received a honorable mention from the judges, and I think it meets my overall quality threshold next to most other "proper" puzzles I'd made. And it should be approachable too!

Rules

Shade a 1-cell wide path connecting starting and ending at a gray circle. The path may not touch itself orthogonally, but may touch itself diagonally.

Divide all unshaded cells into rectangles. Each rectangle must contain exactly one number clue equal to its area.

Difficulty (select to make visible): ★★☆☆☆

Solve in Penpa (answer check for shaded cells and ALL non-border rectangle boundaries)

#6: Cracks on Glass (Sudoku variant)

I was really big on Sudoku-based puzzles back then, huh.

Rules

Classic 6x6 Sudoku rules apply. Additionally, connect pairs of orthogonally adjacent cells with straight lines between their centers, so that all cells form one connected network. Also:

• Cells with digits 1 and 2 should be directly connected to 1 neighbour each.
• Cells with digits 3 and 4 should be directly connected to 2 neighbours each.
• Cells with digits 5 and 6 should be directly connected to 3 neighbours each.

Here is an example of a valid grid with lines drawn in: