Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

Thank goodness, it's finally finished.



The following puzzle is the result of a long time project from myself. I'd teased about 'the upcoming chaos' in the past and now here it goes, a chaos construction puzzle of this one concept that I've been working with for a long while.

Mainly inspired by Jesper's 2nd region X-sum puzzles, I want to make use of this one particular idea revolved around 2nd region in a chaos construction puzzle even though honestly, these kinds of idea don't really appeal as interesting as other concepts. After a broken attempt following by my embarrassing face to look back at it, I had to start all over again and finally managed to achieve another cool result (this also took a long while, not gonna lie).

I found this one striking a great balance between the region building, the arithmetic shenanigans and the irregular parts, even though it may be challenging at times (which is why I'll estimate this one as 5/5 difficulty over here). After a short while of my finish point, I also reconsidered to add an extra clue for a smoother transition to one particular deduction.
Depends on whether everyone'd like a mini challenge or a cleaner transition, I'll let everyone pick the version that everyone will prefer (even though I recommend trying the smoother version actually).


Rules:

- Every row and column contain digits 1-9 each once. Divide the grid into 9 orthogonally connected regions so that each region also contains digits 1-9 each once.

- An outside clue of a row/column shows the total of the first continuous group of cell[s] along that row/column that belongs to the second region seen by that clue in the respective direction of that row/column.

- A question mark (?) can be any digit from 0-9 but for the purpose of a single digit clue, it can't be zero (0). In case of a two-digit number, the first digit is also never zero (0).

- A white dot implies that the four cells surrounding that dot must be divided into exactly two groups of cell[s] so that each group lies within a single region. Not all possible white dots are given.



An example image can be found below here. One can also solve this 6x6 example puzzle in
F-puzzle  -  Penpa plus  -  Sudokupad



Original version:  F-puzzle  -  Penpa plus  -  Sudokupad


The version with an extra clue:  F-puzzle  -  Penpa plus  -  Sudokupad

Good luck and have fun solving!