Hybrid Star Battle Bonus (A) - Taj Mahal
(Published on 29. January 2023, 16:58 by BenceJoful)
Intro
Surprise! When I was considering the puzzle genres that would work well for the Hybrid Star Battle Series, I remembered Taj Mahal from the excellent GAPP series on CTC Community Discord. My immediate thought was "Well at least I'll never set one of those", but then I couldn't stop thinking about it until I had actually done it!
In addition, this puzzle doesn't exactly use Star Battle rules, but rather a variant called Star Tilt. So, this very wonky puzzle hybrid is being published as a bonus.
Rules
Standard Taj Mahal and Star Tilt (Star Battle variant) rules apply.
- Taj Mahal: Draw straight lines connecting pairs of grid points to form squares (allowing non-orthogonal lines). Squares may only touch at the corners, and all squares must form one connected network. Circles mark the centers of all squares drawn in the grid.
- Star Tilt (where region = Taj Mahal square): Shade 2 cells in each row and column so that no two shaded cells touch, even diagonally. A shaded cell which is partially within a Taj Majal square counts as 1/2 for that square. Each Taj Mahal square must contain a total value of two cells.
Links
7x7 1-star Example (Penpa+ link):
8x8 2-star Example (Penpa+ link):
Solution code: For each shaded cell (left-to-right, top-to-bottom), give the number of edges which intersect it. In the 2-star example, the code is 1110120000000000.
Comments
on 19. February 2023, 16:51 by BMEP
It took me ages… great puzzle!
on 5. February 2023, 15:21 by BenceJoful
@polar You're very welcome :)
@kjholt and szabog You're not wrong, with both of these genres it's quite easy to miss a possibility, and Taj Mahal especially is quite unforgiving when you do. Thanks for playing!
on 30. January 2023, 19:29 by szabog
Kjholt, I feel the same. This is a mean puzzle :)
on 30. January 2023, 19:00 by kjholt
I'm finding this to be absolutely impossible and I must be missing something obvious... I have resorted to systematically trying star locations and nothing works. Then I tried changing the Taj Mahal configuration but nothing else worked there either.
Edit: apparently there was one configuration I missed :) I knew it! :')
on 30. January 2023, 12:17 by polar
Thanks for the wonky bonus :)
