Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

This is the puzzle I created for The Book Wyrm during the Secret Satan puzzle exchange. It was an opportunity to push the boundaries of puzzle creation beyond what I normally do. I think it's by far the craziest and most intricate ruleset I've set, probably one of the hardest solves as well. It will likely require a high cognitive load, with multiple layers of logic embedded in the puzzle, and a marathon solve time is to be expected. I still encourage you to give it a try, as I think it's one of the best puzzles I have created so far.

Rules

• Shade some cells in the grid. Place a digit from 1 to 9 into every unshaded cell so that no repeating digits occur in any row or column. Shaded cells do not contain digits.


• Directed Loop (Crossing): Draw a directed loop that travels orthogonally through the centers of some cells. The loop may cross itself, but may not turn at an intersection or otherwise overlap.


• Chaos Deconstruction: All unshaded cells must belong to a region of up to 9 orthogonally connected cells. A region of size N contains the digits 1 through N once each. Regions are allowed to touch each other orthogonally.


• Interaction: On a single round trip of the loop, each region must be entered and exited exactly once.


• Castle Wall Delta: A number in a clue cell indicates the absolute difference between the amount of steps made towards that cell and the amount of steps made away from that cell, when completing a single round trip of the loop. Only steps within the row or column of the clue cell count.


• Japanese Sums: Clues outside the grid represent the sum of values in each contiguous sequence of unshaded cells in the respective row or column. For a given row or column, either all clues or no clues are given.


• Modifiers: For any Japanese Sums clue, the value of a digit on a loop segment going towards that clue is increased by 1. Conversely, the value of a digit on a loop segment going away from that clue is decreased by 1. Values of digits are otherwise unchanged.


• Cipher: Each letter represents a different digit from 0 to 9. A question mark may represent any digit from 0 to 9, but for double digit numbers, the first digit may not be 0.


• Clarification: Castle Wall Delta clues cannot belong to a region, and cannot be visited by the loop. For the purpose of Japanese Sums, the clue number is not considered a digit, and the clue cell interrupts any contiguous sequence of unshaded cells on either side.

Initiation Ritual (8x8)

• Penpa+
• SudokuPad

Walls of Eternal Damnation (13x13)

• Penpa+
• SudokuPad

I highly recommend Penpa+ for this puzzle, since there's more options for directed loops. If you decide to attempt the solve in SudokuPad, my suggestion would be to use the colour of line segments to represent their direction (e.g. green segments go upwards or to the left, red segments go downwards or to the right).