Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

When I started setting last year, I received an encouraging support from Niverio, who tested my first published puzzle and streamed several of them on his channel. Since then, I knew I would want to make a kind of tribute puzzle, and my recent interest in liar japanese sums gave me the idea to make one with a related thematic (namely the basic shape of his twitch logo, without the fancy green flames). The unique ... clue is totally intended here, because I know Niv is really fond of them ;) I also like the logic that comes with it. And well, I know the design would be better without the inequality sign of course. It was a late addition because I made a tiny mistake while setting, and I would lose a lot of later logic with any other extra JS clue. I actually like the logical step it added here, so I settled on publishing this version. Have fun solving !

The puzzle :

Play on Penpa

Play on Sudokupad

Rules :

- Latin square : Place the digits 0 to 9 exactly once in each row and each column.

- Cave : Shade some cells in the grid such that all unshaded cells are orthogonally connected, and all shaded cells are orthogonally connected by other shaded cells to an edge of the grid.

- Shaded Ten Line : the grey line must be broken into strings of contiguous digits which sum to 10, and these strings cannot overlap. Digits may repeat freely on a 10 line, and even within a sum. Each string of digits summing to 10 is entirely shaded or entirely unshaded, and this must alternate along the line. (For example, if the first string is shaded, the second is unshaded, the third shaded...)

- Liar japanese sums : Clues outside the grid indicate either the sums of the continuous blocks of unshaded cells in that row, column or diagonal. For every clued row, column or diagonal, 2 different sets are provided (Left / Right for rows, Top / Bottom for columns, Top-Right / Bottom-Left for the diagonal) One set is correct, with all the correct sums in the correct order.(Always left to right or top to bottom.) The other set is a lie (As a whole, individual parts of the liar set can still be sometimes correct).

- Cipher : In the sets of clues, a "..." means any number of clues, including none. A "?" is a stand in for any digit 0-9, but for a double digit number, the first digit may not be 0. Clues are encrypted. Each distinct letter represents some unique digit from 0-9.

- Inequality sign : the inequality sign points to the lowest of the 2 digits.

Example puzzle : TEN-O ! (without the cipher) :

Play on Penpa

Play on Sudokupad