Friday Puzzles #12

So I’ve recently managed to get a reader hooked to the Nurikabe puzzle, which I am feeling quite pleased about because it is a rather nice puzzle. Thus far I have only really produced three of the Nikoli puzzle types (together with some variations upon their themes) – and I have been in two minds as to whether to branch out. This week the decision was placed into my own hands, as I got a bit lazy and so had to stick with something familiar.

However, having seen a link to a contest to publish a completely original puzzle, I have been having a think. In the works I’ve got something that manages to combine elements of Slitherlink with that of Nurikabe. More to come on that in the next few weeks.

Back to the here and now though, here’s a Masyu puzzle. I unsuccessfully tried to force in some global thinking into this puzzle; trying to nail down uniqueness invariably seemed to simplify things a little bit too much. Still, I’ve thrown in a little tributary “best of” Masyu tricks that I’ve seen on nikoli.com fairly recently. If you’ve seen these before, it’ll be possible to whizz through this in under a minute – 45s on paper from me to beat – if not there’ll be a couple of things you’ll need to think about.

    #016 Masyu – rated medium

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009