Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

As hinted in the previous installment of this Snakomino serie, the big snake is now going underground, heading into a cave. Will you help him find his way out ?

Basically, imagine a snake travelling along the corridors of a cave, made of fillomino walls, and being able to take shortcuts (or not...) via tunnel/warp zones. Sounds familiar ? Reminding you the adventures of a famous mustachioed plumber maybe... Well, that game has a special place in my childhood's memories, so I tried to put several references to it in the puzzle. Can you find them all ? (I put the answers in hidden comment)

The rules for this one are long and may be a bit tricky to understand, so I provided a solvable example puzzle that will help you speedrun through the details of the ruleset. I suggest that you try this easy example puzzle first.

Thanks to polar for testing !

Rules

- Snake : Travelling through the grid is a snake, composed of several segments. Each segment is a one-cell wide region of orthogonally connected cells. It may not branch or touch itself orthogonally, but may touch diagonally. The snake segments must be connected via "warp zones" (see below). The first and last cells of the snake (head and tail) are in the 2 green squares.

- Fillomino rules apply : Disregarding the cells visited by the snake, divide the rest of grid into regions so that no two regions of the same size share an edge. Enter a number into each cell equal to the size of its region.

- Walls : all the fillominos cells are orthogonally connected by other fillomino cells to an edge of the grid. This includes the edges of the grey holes inside the grid.

- Clues : given digits/numbers in the grid are ambiguous, either snake clues or fillomino clues, to be determined by the solver. A snake clue indicates the number of snake cells seen in all directions from that cell, including that cell (as in a cave puzzle). Fillomino cells and grid borders block the view. A fillomino clue indicates that the cell is part of a fillomino of that size.

- Warp Zones : dashed circles represent potential "warp zones", where the snake has the ability to "transport" itself from a circle to another. Each warp zone is composed of 2 circles, which must contain the same digit/number. That digit/number must be a valid snake clue, and must be different for each warp zone. To be able to go through a warp zone, the snake must stop exactly on a circle. If there is no given digit/number in the circle, you need to write a valid snake clue. The snake will have to reappear in the circle with the same clue. If the snake does not stop precisely on a circle, it goes straight above that circle, which has no effect. The snake cannot take a turn on a circle. Some circles may also find themselves inside the walls/fillomino. In that case, they will have no effect and be part of a fillomino.

Speedrun - Solve on Penpa

Warp Zones - Solve on Penpa

Difficulty should be between 4 and 4.5/5, because it could be quite a long solve, but none of the steps are monstrously difficult. Just a long ride to enjoy ! My advice for solving this puzzle is to shade in grey the non-snake snake cells, and use the line tool to keep track of the cells that must belong to the same fillomino, like in the example solution.

Enjoy ! And consider leaving a comment if you appreciate the puzzle !

You can check out my other puzzles here if you liked this one.