Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

Panthera's Pentominous Parity Puzzle

(Published on 29. May 2021, 20:00 by Panthera)

It's been a couple of months since I last set a sudoku - I returned to my first true puzzling love, cryptic crosswords, for a while - but some time back, the fickle beast that is inspiration gave my brain a poke and said "time for something more logical"... so yeah, this puzzle traces its inception to me watching Simon from Cracking The Cryptic solve Lucy Audrin's "Return of the Pentominous Odds", and thinking that some of the parity logic involved would play rather nicely with killer cages. Then I saw someone in the comments, in an otherwise glowing review, say that it was a shame the pentiminoes in the finished puzzle weren't all joined together...

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Rules
Normal sudoku rules apply.
The expression in the top-left corner of each cage describes the sum of all the digits within it, giving either the value or the parity thereof. The values of constants x and y are to be determined - they may not necessarily be distinct integers!
Within boxes, all odd digits must be contiguous, thus forming pentominoes. Furthermore, all the odd digits in the puzzle must be contiguous - that is, the nine pentominoes form a contiguous region.

You can solve it on f-puzzles here! The colours in the image above do not appear at this link, because they are completely irrelevant to the solve and were included mainly to make it look pretty. That said, they're also meant to highlight the fact that there are, appropriately enough, five cages of each type, and that the cells involved in cages are all symmetrically arranged. Working towards such neatness actually made the puzzle better than its original draft, for reasons that I won't even pretend to understand.

Solution code: Column 5 and the values of x and y, no spaces.

Last changed on on 30. May 2021, 00:19

Solved by thetiredsaint, zetamath, nordloc, ymhsbmbesitwf, Vebby, fjam
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Comments

on 5. June 2021, 09:47 by Vebby
So much fun! Excellent puzzle Panthera!! Attempted it on the recommendation of zetamath. Hours well spent :)

on 31. May 2021, 10:20 by nordloc
Well that was great. Tough to the end

on 31. May 2021, 04:23 by zetamath
Absolutely brutal in difficulty, but well worth the time. Highly recommended!

on 30. May 2021, 00:19 by Panthera
as CJK so astutely pointed out, this is in fact a sudoku, and now the tags reflect this

Last changed on 30. May 2021, 00:21

on 29. May 2021, 23:27 by CJK
Since this is a sudoku puzzle, could you please add the sudoku tag? :)

>oh absolutely, that's a fair cop, especially given that it's not named as such in the title... ta for the heads up :3

on 29. May 2021, 20:00 by Panthera
just a formatting error that I spotted literally the moment I activated the puzzle, because of course

Difficulty:4
Rating:N/A
Solved:6 times
Observed:8 times
ID:0006HC

Puzzle variant Pentominoes

Enter solution

Solution code:

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