Subway To Hell
(Published on 27. January 2024, 15:45 by Piatato)
This is a puzzle that I created as a gift for Agent, as part of an event called Secret Satan. Although I don't think that this puzzle is quite as hard as last year's monster, it's certainly no lightweight, and small inaccuracies will be severely punished!
Rules:
Shade some cells in the grid to form X (an unknown number that is unrelated to the cipher letters, and that must be deduced during the solve) snakes. A snake is a non-branching collection of orthogonally connected cells, that is one cell wide. Each snake has a unique length of 1-X cells. Snakes may touch other snakes diagonally, but not orthogonally.
In all unshaded cells, write a digit from 1-9, so that no digits repeat in a row or a column.
Draw a loop network through the centers of all the unshaded cells, which may branch or turn, but may not have any dead ends.
Assign a value to each line shape: L=1, I=2, T=3 and X=4.
Clues above and to the left of the grid give the sum of the digits plus the sum of the line shapes on each group of unshaded cells in the corresponding row or column. All such clues are given.
Every distinct letter represents a distinct digit from 0 to 9. A question mark represents any digit, but for a double digit number, the first digit cannot be 0.
Solution code: The total value of each cell in column 10, top to bottom. For shaded cells, write 'S'. E.g.: 4 6 13 7 3 S S S 9 9 3 9
Comments
on 16. March 2024, 15:41 by Silverstep
I can't believe you made a masterpiece like this and managed to put "Got Snakez?" in the cipher. That alone is worth +1 beauty rating.
on 16. March 2024, 14:41 by Piatato
Updated the image, since the previous one lacked a clue. Huge apologies to anybody that may have tried the puzzle and broken it due to my mistake.
on 7. February 2024, 14:38 by MagnusJosefsson
Amazing puzzle!
on 31. January 2024, 13:18 by ONeill
Very nice puzzle! I can vouch for the punishment of small inaccuracies :(
on 29. January 2024, 23:58 by Myxo
Really cool puzzle, but that scanning is extremely difficult!
on 29. January 2024, 15:03 by Christounet
Great puzzle !! Enjoyed the first part so much, with the snake logic and the weird jsum arithmetic. I was so afraid to make a wrong count in the final resolution ! A puzzle very worthy of its satanic title :) Thanks :)
on 28. January 2024, 20:23 by Vebby
Wonderful puzzle!
on 28. January 2024, 13:56 by zzw
Super cool puzzle! Luckily it's still possible to solve if you're terrible at u-bahn :)
on 27. January 2024, 23:51 by Jesper
Great puzzle, I thoroughly enjoyed testing it some weeks ago!
on 27. January 2024, 17:45 by Agent
Wonderful puzzle, thanks a lot for this gift/punishment! Really neat interactions between the constraint. I especially enjoyed the snake-building logic.
on 27. January 2024, 17:15 by mnasti2
I cried when I first read the rules but it turned out super fun!
on 27. January 2024, 17:02 by filuta
indeed, really enjoyed being punished in this one!
