Rock, Paper, Scissors
(Published on 4. January 2024, 16:33 by IcyFruit)
Place the digits 1-9 once each in every row and column.
Divide the grid into 3 orthogonally connected regions such that each pair of regions shares an edge, and no 2x2 area of the grid is occupied by a single region.
Each region wins against one other region and loses to another. For any two adjacent digits in different regions, the winning region must have the larger digit.
Digits separated by an arrow differ by at least 3, with the arrow pointing to the smaller digit. All arrows are on the border between two regions.
Example
In this example, purple wins against blue, blue wins against yellow, and yellow wins against purple.
Solution code: Columns 6 and 8
Comments
on 27. May 2024, 17:35 by SirJefferE
Yikes. This one took me far longer than it should have. Ended up putting it away for a few weeks at a time and restarted a few times, but found myself coming back to it anyway.
on 28. January 2024, 14:22 by Silverstep
after wrestling with this puzzle for 3+ hours, I have an advice for any aspiring solvers. use the "pen tool" to draw a short thermo on EVERY edge that you already know the orientation of. it will help, I promise.
on 26. January 2024, 22:22 by Myxo
Really interesting puzzle! The region building is lovely and evil. Some tough scanning is required at the end of the solve to resolve everything!
on 4. January 2024, 21:36 by IcyFruit
Updated link with fixed rendering
on 4. January 2024, 17:52 by wand
on my browser all the arrows render in reverse for some reason - I think I can just mentally flip them, but just fyi!
https://ibb.co/pbWMfqb
