Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

A new puzzle type (hopefully)!

This is a puzzle, in which the order of the solution steps is important. The puzzle is about a path and some crosses on an irregular grid.

At the bottom there’s an example puzzle with its solution.

From the given starting point, draw a single path consisting of individual line segments. Line segments are added by performing consecutive moves; the following rules apply to each move:

• When performing a move, a new line segment is drawn from the cell, that contains the current “head” of the path, to an orthogonally adjacent cell — so from path head to target cell and always from center to center of each cell.
• A move is not allowed, if the line would leave the grid, or if there’s already a line segment in the target cell, or if there’s a cross there. The target cell must be empty.
• When adding a line segment in the direction of the target cell, a cross must be placed in the first cell which is still empty in the opposite direction (from the path head). This cell may be arbitrarily far behind; it may skip over other crosses, line segments, and even gaps in the grid.
• A move is not allowed, if the cross cannot be placed in the grid.

The goal is to fill the grid completely with either line segments or crosses.

The puzzle

White cells are part of the grid, gray ones are not.

Penpa link.

When solving, of course you don’t have to use actual crosses; the cells may also be marked in a different manner. In Penpa+ the Surface mode with the color DG (dark gray) is helpful since you can fill in two different colors, depending on whether you perform a left or right mouse click.

Example

This animation shows the moves for solving this easy example puzzle. Filled cells are green, the black arrow points from the path head towards the target cell, the gray arrows point towards the next cell in the opposite direction that still has room for a cross.

Oh, and one more thing: can you think of a good name for this puzzle?