Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

These puzzles don’t have a link, feel free to skip my puzzle, you won’t miss anything.

Standard sudoku rules applies. Fill the grid with numbers in cells from 1 to 6 so each digit occurs exactly once in every row, column and 2x3 box.

Color some small cells black. Digit implies how many small cells in the big cell are black. Outside clues indicate the biggest and smallest length of continuous black small cells. If two clues are the same, then the biggest length equals the smallest length.

This is just an accident. I was going to set a sudoku variant, but it got closer to nonogram. I might as well record this for future setting.

It all started when i want to set a variant concerning black and white. Of course i’m not interested in doing coloring dots. So, generic. It has to be coloring cells, which brings another problem. Why coloring? The parity use circles and squares, not black and gray. I have to find a reason for the coloring, it has to be the best way to showcase the rules and non-replaceable by any other symbols.

But when i told this to Old Miles, he thought it nonogram-like. My first reaction, no. Nonogram is pixel art. I can use my limited artistic brain cells to guess how the line goes. And i remember seeing some interesting pixel art. So, my job is, try to find another interesting point in nonogram. I do a little recap of my experience with nonogram. I think i got frustrated when i need to deal with bunch of 1s. i need to not go that way. My answer is in the puzzle.

Since i only post something not close to sudoku, i might as well say some more. I think my thinking of puzzles is very different from other setters. Because my sudoku variant setter background, i’m constantly looking for variants in puzzles. And that is when i notice the chaos in puzzles. I really don’t think setters take naming seriously. A good example is tapa and pata. When thinking of tapa and pata, one may thinks them as siblings. They seems to have a mom, a source that branch, but there’s no such source puzzle. In other words, puzzles has more width but no depth. It’s like a plain of sand. Some sand seems to cluster, but when looking for what keeps them together, they just shattered. Compared to sudoku, every variant is like a branch off the trunk. And when i ask the question, why there are so few variants in puzzles but more names. Why simple changes in rules result in a different puzzle name but not a puzzle variant? The answer is usually why puzzle need variants. For me, one answer is that it’s easier for me to understand a puzzle, since variant is suppose to reflect the source. I’m still trying to find some kind of system in a puzzle like sudoku.