Frost's Dilemma
(Published on 10. February 2025, 21:00 by 99%Sneaky)
The difficulty of the puzzle may depend on one's experience with pencil-puzzle genres outside of sudoku. I suspect this may feel like anywhere from 3 to 5 stars depending on said experience, so I'm going with the average. I'm interested to know your thoughts on the difficulty and if you felt that having pencil-puzzle experience (if applicable) was indeed useful here. Good luck and have fun :)
Rules:
#1 Normal sudoku rules apply.
#2 Draw a road in the grid. The road is a continuous path of orthogonally connected cells starting in R5C5 and ending in R9C1. Each 3x3 box is visited by the road exactly once. The road does not branch and it never enters the same cell more than once. The road moves through both gray circles.
#3 Build Your Own Thermometers: In each box, digits continuously increase along the road from the cell where the road enters the box (or from the starting cell) until it exits the box (or reaches the end cell).
#4 Cells containing the same letter in their top-left corner contain the same digit. Each unique letter represents a different digit in the puzzle. All cells containing a letter are on the road.
Play on SudokuPad/CTC App
Solution code: The digit in the central cell of each box (boxes ordered from left-to-right, top-to-bottom) if and only if that digit appears on the road.
Comments
on 13. February 2025, 02:00 by askaksaksask
This was a really pleasant surprise. Certainly, having a good foundation in pencil puzzles helps, but the interactions here are so well designed, there really isn't a free pass. And the sudoku/road logic was fun to crack. Nicely done. I think your assessment of the difficulty is actually spot on. I hope more people discover this one. Thank you!
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Muchos gracias! Glad to hear you enjoyed your journey though the yellow wood :) I believe there are a few different ways to work through this one, which I am in favor of.
on 11. February 2025, 10:51 by Mr. Happy
Delightful construction!
