Everything in its Right Place
(Published on 16. October 2023, 01:53 by marty_sears)
I thought of the idea and main deductions of this puzzle while waiting in the queue at the airport, and then designed most of it on the plane trip from London to Bucharest. Very keen to hear how people get on with this and if you think the 4 star difficulty rating is fair.
Rules:
- Normal sudoku rules apply.
- Draw 3 snakes which must each begin and end at a different grey spot. Snakes are lines which may move orthogonally and diagonally between cells. They may touch each other (or themselves), and can even cross eachother, but they must not branch, share cells with each other, or enter cages.
- A digit on a snake indicates exactly how many times that digit appears on that snake. Eg: If there is a 5 on a snake, there are five 5s on that snake.
- One snake is a German Whisper line; along it, adjacent digits must differ by at least 5.
- One snake is a slow thermometer; along this line, reading from one end to the other, digits must always increase or stay the same.
- One snake is entropic; along it, any group of 3 adjacent cells must contain one low digit (1, 2 or 3), one medium digit (4, 5 or 6) and one high digit (7, 8 or 9.)
- Digits in a cage must sum to the small clue given in that cage.
- Digits separated by a V sum to 5.
Click here to play on the CTC app
Please leave a comment if you enjoy :)
Click here to play the sequel to this puzzle: Modular Snakes
Solution code: Row 7 from left to right
Comments
on 24. October 2024, 20:49 by The Book Wyrm
Fun puzzle. Definitely not 5* for me, wasn't too hard. Just needed a bit of thinking about how the snakes worked with the constraints on them, and it starts falling apart.
on 9. January 2024, 18:48 by Geb
This one fully deserves the five star difficulty rating, certainly not going to say it's easy, but I feel the difficulty comes from a few places where it's easy to make a mistake. Once you avoid those few pitfalls this is a smooth solve and a lovely puzzle! Had a lot of fun with this. Amazing work.
on 1. January 2024, 19:06 by BlueShifted
Beautiful puzzle, the ruleset seems so difficult but working out the logic got things started smoothly. This one of my favorite indeed, brilliant work!
on 14. December 2023, 04:08 by blackjackfitz
Beautiful! And now I get to watch the CTC feature
on 11. December 2023, 07:58 by ddx01
This puzzle is insanely good! Thank you, marty_sears! ^_^
on 24. October 2023, 01:52 by Silverbyte
This puzzle broke my brain in all the right places. I "logicked" it must've been impossible at least three times at different points before it finally clicked and everything suddenly fell into place two hours later. Truly excellent puzzle.
on 21. October 2023, 14:35 by Whaargaarbl
What an excellent puzzle, such beautiful logic.
on 18. October 2023, 16:33 by sanabas
Excellent puzzle. Things are very restricted with a bit of thought, so felt more like 2-3 star difficulty to break into it, then it flowed nicely, always a relatively obvious spot to look next.
on 17. October 2023, 14:45 by Prof.Dori
Brilliant puzzle from start to finish. I loved every step of it and the logic was very cool. This just shows how circle rule has so much potential to make great sudoku like this one. And this was very special. Thank you for the puzzle.
on 16. October 2023, 16:25 by Fool on Hill
Original logic again! Plenty to think about and very nicely put together.
on 16. October 2023, 12:44 by ThePedallingPianist
It's crazy how well this flows from what initially seems like such an unrestricted ruleset! Fantastic puzzle :D
on 16. October 2023, 12:41 by aspirin_waffle
thanks, that was a great puzzle. it seemed overwhelming at first glance but I quickly started seeing interesting interactions between the line types and the digit count constraint. from there working out the line paths was a nice smooth series of deductions. thank you
