Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

You are caught by the Curse of King Minos and must find a way to escape the lurking Minotaur! Only by following the ancient rules will you find your way to freedom:

Normal Sudoku rules apply.

Yin-Yang: Color every cell in the grid one of two colors such that all cells of each color are orthogonally connected and no 2x2 region is a single color.

Sight Squares: A digit in a square indicates how many cells of the same color are seen orthogonally from that position, including itself, where cells of the other color block vision.

Anti-King: Diagonally adjacent cells may not contain the same digit.

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My original goal with this puzzle was to create a hybrid yin-yang puzzle with only sight squares and no other clues. This is indeed possible, but the resulting puzzle tends to require so many sight square clues to make the Sudoku unique that the yin-yang pattern is horribly over-clued and trivial to solve. I next tried adding Anti-King rules, and this helps balance to the two halves of the puzzle tremendously, but because the digit 1 can never appear in a sight square, the sight square clues must be powerful enough to force a 1 by placing all 8 other digits somewhere in the puzzle. This is again possible, but tends to require either more sight squares than I liked, or diabolical anti-king deductions that makes the Sudoku portion of the puzzle way more challenging than the yin-yang portion. I wanted to find a balance, so I finally conceded and tried adding a given digit. I realized that adding a 1 cleverly avoids providing any help for the yin-yang pattern, while simplifying the Sudoku. With the maze-like yin-yang rule, the anti-KING rule, and a very "monstrous" 1 hanging out in the middle of the grid, choosing the name was easiest step of making this puzzle. I hope you enjoy The Curse of King Minos :)

If this is your first yin-yang puzzle, there are some "secret" consequences to yin-yang rules that are necessary to discover in order to find the break-in to this puzzle. I've included the secrets below in case you need some help. (highlight to reveal)

Secret #1: No 2x2 in the grid can contain a checkerboard of the two colors. This is because any path orthogonally connecting the pair of cells of one color necessarily cuts off the other two cells from each other.

Secret #2: Either every cell along the perimeter of the grid is the same color, or there are exactly 2 changes of color as you run around the perimeter. If there are more than 2 changes of color, that creates at least 4 groups of cells along the perimeter, 2 of each color, and any path orthogonally connecting the pair of regions of one color necessarily cuts off the other two regions from each other. The perimeter acts like a giant inside-out checkerboard!

If you enjoy this puzzle, I highly recommend the Yin-Yang Sight-Line (YYSL) series by Blobz, which served as a huge inspiration for this puzzle. This recent entry contains links to all of the other puzzles in the YYSL series: YYSL Renban