Advent Calendar
(Published on 1. December 2024, 12:00 by Bearded Fool)
Rules:
In your advent calendar there are 25 treat cages. The digits in each treat cage sum to different totals, one each of 1-25, inclusive. However, the sequence of days on your advent calendar is completely out of order, so you do not know which cage sums to what total. To help you make sense of it, there are two colors of cages, red cages (with white dashes) and green cages (with black dashes). One cage type sums to even cage totals and the other cage type sums to odd cage totals. Digits do not repeat in cages.
In further unfortunate news, some of your treat cages have already been opened! Your chocolates are spilling out! Milk chocolate dots separate cells with digits in a 2:1 ratio. White chocolate dots separate cells with consecutive digits. Some chocolate dots may have unknowingly spilled to the floor so not all are necessarily given.
To Play:
SudokuPad
Solution code: Column 4, up to down, no spaces
Comments
on 7. December 2024, 05:38 by crossoverdoc
loved this puzzle ! 50 minutes for me so I’ll give it 3 stars . awesome logic from start to finish . i used the cage totals near the end, but it was mostly even/odd sorting
on 6. December 2024, 19:11 by Adrian71
Loved it thoroughly! Thanks for the great puzzle!
on 4. December 2024, 22:41 by virus_dave
Nice! I solved it **almost** without needing to use the cage sums, so perhaps i went about it the extra hard way or something. Would have been much easier without the thick green/red cage borders though, as those interfere somewhat with the visibility of one of my annotation conventions (drawing colored boxes around dominoes with particular XOR relationships).
Overall quite a delightful puzzle, thanks so much for setting it!
on 3. December 2024, 19:39 by Ragna
Wow! What a beautiful puzzle! Thank you for your time. :-))
on 3. December 2024, 09:25 by Hammond X
Brilliant
on 2. December 2024, 16:37 by Bionic Cheese
Great puzzle , thanks ☺️
on 2. December 2024, 14:07 by Bearded Fool
updated rules in SudokuPad link
on 2. December 2024, 13:55 by HumanBirdsong
Wonderful but extremely difficult puzzle, well done! Just FYI the SudokuPad rules don't currently mention that digits cannot repeat in cages.
on 2. December 2024, 12:28 by Snookerfan
Very nice, tricky and fun puzzle! Thank you
on 2. December 2024, 06:43 by evan0822
First 4 star and took nearly 2.5 hours. Loads of fun!!!
on 1. December 2024, 22:12 by askaksaksask
Such great setting to require such a good range of techniques to solve; fun and difficult
on 1. December 2024, 17:43 by WildEnte
fun!
on 1. December 2024, 14:42 by Visumation
Very cool. I agree with the closer to 4 stars comment. Very nice setting. Thanks for sharing.
on 1. December 2024, 13:31 by wuc
What a clever puzzle. Felt very rewarding. Close to 4 star difficulty for me. One hour of pure fun thx.
