Thursday, April 11, 2024

#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:


First few puzzles should approachable enough to solve without hints. Still, [here are some useful basic patterns to look out for]:
  • [cells with at least one exit blocked can never be an intersection]
  • [cell with three lines must be an intersection]
  • [lines forming an S- or Z-shape must have at least one intersection at one of the turns]
  • [currently isolated loops must have at least one intersection]
  • [occasionally it's easy to see that a line can't continue straight, or can't turn in its preferred direction]
Additionally, [it's very useful to somehow mark cells that contain "fake" turns which may potentially turn into intersections, and also "true" turns which can't.]

Turn, Straight, or Cross?

Difficulty: [★☆☆☆☆]

Breathing Room

Difficulty: [★☆☆☆☆]

Downtown


Cirrus

[This one focuses on spotting line extensions that can't be continued.]

1 comment:

  1. Lovely puzzles! Nice intro to the genre. 😊

    ReplyDelete

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