Highways and Byways
(Published on 24. April 2023, 00:04 by Jay Dyer)
Rules
- Shade some cells, and enter digits from 1-9 in the shaded cells so that each orthogonally-connected shaded region contains the digits 1-N once each, where N is the size of the region. Digits may not repeat in a row or column. Unshaded cells do not contain digits.
- Clues next to a row/column give the sums of digits in the contiguous blocks of shaded cells in that row/column, in order. The clues are ciphered: each letter corresponds to a different digit from 0-9, and a ? may be any digit, but the leading digit of a clue is never zero. * may represent any nonzero sum, and ... may represent any number of sums, including none. In each row/column, either all clues or no clues are given.
- Draw a single loop with no branches or crossings through the centres of some cells. The loop visits every shaded region exactly once. If a cell on a straight edge of the loop (this includes the edge's end corners) is in a shaded region, the size of that region equals the number of cells on the edge.
Example
Play the example in Penpa+ or Sudokupad.
Solution code: Column 7 (use 0 for empty cells).
Comments
on 6. May 2023, 16:49 by madhupt
An absolutely fantastic and beast of a puzzle. Really struggled with this and am really proud that I was finally able to finish it. It was amazing to see how both the sums and loops work together to reveal secrets about each other.
What a masterpiece!
on 25. April 2023, 22:01 by polar
Always nice to see more JS puzzles here. No doubt a challenging puzzle throughout. There was always some logical way forward but for me personally, I think a few of the '...' could have been sacrificed to smooth out the solve.
on 25. April 2023, 16:06 by Jay Dyer
Added a clue to resolve an ambiguity I'd missed.
on 25. April 2023, 14:40 by Jay Dyer
Fixed a missing clue in the example puzzle Penpa link.
on 25. April 2023, 04:32 by RJBlarmo
Just did the example, in the Penpa version there's an asterisk clue that should be an E in R7. Excited to try the main puzzle!
Edit: Wow, that was an amazing puzzle but very difficult for me. Made very many mistakes during my solve but finally got there!
on 24. April 2023, 00:15 by Andrewsarchus
Amazing puzzle! Each step feels like it has been carefully crafted to give just enough information to allow progress, while still maintaining a smooth solve path.
