This was part of a Setting Competition held in 2024/2025.
The Skunkworks League was hosted by @damasosos92.
The competition took place in a total of 7 turns with a unique prompt for each round. Setter's had to create and test a unique puzzle for each prompt solely by themselves.
As of the prompt for Turn 5 of TSL the goal was to create a Recoil as invented by @SebastianSimon in his puzzle Path with opposite crosses.
@damasosos92 also created some easy introduction puzzles for this genre as well. These also include a few examples for the ruleset and can be found here:
Recoil: An Introduction
Recoil: A Proper Introduction
Recoil: No Longer an Introduction
Rules:
Starting at the black diamond, draw a directed path through the centers of some cells in the grid. Path segments are drawn sequentially from cell to cell, such that the first path segment is drawn from the black diamond to an adjacent empty cell, the second segment is drawn from that cell to the next empty cell, and so on until the final segment is drawn and the path ends.
The path cannot branch or revisit a cell it has visited before.
Every time the path enters a new cell, a “recoiled cell” is placed in the first empty cell in the opposite direction. This recoiled cell may skip over gaps in the grid, other recoiled cells, or other path cells.
The path cannot enter a cell if its corresponding recoiled cell cannot be placed into the grid.
All cells of the grid must be visited by the path or contain a recoiled cell.