Friday Puzzles #45

It’s funny how quickly a year goes by. It came to my attention this week that actually today’s entry marks the one year anniversary of my Friday Puzzle series. Reading back over the original entry, I’m not sure how successful I’ve been in this not being a massively Sudoku dominated thing – I guess I stick to what I know best and there have been a good chunk of Sudoku or Sudoku variants posted on this blog over the past year. On the other hand, the other two main players have been two puzzles which I really do enjoy – Masyu and Nurikabe – and I hope that I’ve introduced readers into some of the flavours of these two wonderful puzzles.

Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that 45 is by no means equal to 53, which is the number I ought to be on had Friday Puzzles actually happened on a weekly basis. Alas, various factors have meant that this isn’t the case – not least the break I took at the end of the year. In that post, I recapped on what had been my favourite puzzles so far. I feel obliged to add to that list since then, as there have been a couple of beauties, in my opinion:

• Week 38: Arrow Sudoku – OK I’ve seen nicer examples of Arrow Sudoku than this, most notably the WSC puzzle upon which I was moved to write “a thing of beauty” on the page, but this certainly has an interesting visual appeal together with a satisfying solve.
• Week 34: Masyu – probably the most elegant masyu puzzle I’ll ever write.
• Week 32: Killer Sudoku – a killer with more than a taste of kakuro, and definitely no cage addition.
• Week 31: Sudoku – I link directly to this puzzle rather than the blog post, as the excellence of this puzzle was somewhat overshadowed by a more controversial puzzle published simultaneously. [The offence caused was perhaps something I’m not overly proud of now, but I still stand by it given the personal context]. Anyhow, I don’t want to do any more overshadowing here, so be assured that this puzzle is a good’un.

And for the sake of posterity, here are the previous picks once more:

• Week 26: Nurikabe
• Week 19: Klein Bottle Sudoku
• Week 10: No Tens Sudoku
• Week 5: Nurikabe
• Week 1: Sudoku

Anyhow, returning to my indexing quandry, I have decided that this week I shall release a “Friday” puzzle daily, until I get up to #52 next week – which should be #54 – and then another two the following week until in two weeks time I should be on course for #55. I might even look at filling in that missing double-toroidal Sudoku I completely forgot about in Week 7; although perhaps the complete absence of Week 17 will be harder to overcome…

I’ve got this far into the anniversary post, without referring to my almost famous off-shoot and pretender to the crown of being the Tom with the original Friday Puzzles series. I’ve hopefully mentioned Thomas Snyder’s blog enough times for regular readers to be familiar with it, but if for some reason you aren’t, you should definitely take the time to have a look – suffice to say there aren’t too many people on this planet like Mr Snyder. Anyhow, in a recent revelation, it turns out he doesn’t much like hitori. Or maybe he does.

Actually, I like to think that last entry was at least in some part induced by a provocative comment I left on nikoli.com, but who knows. This week’s inspiration goes with the whole hitori thing, and today’s puzzle is the warm-up to tomorrow’s full-blooded affair. So not a massively amazing puzzle for the one year anniversary, but hopefully the coming week will make up for it. Enjoy – and thanks to each of my 3,043 unique visitors (since last September when I got Google analytics up and running) for sticking with me so far! :)

    #055 Hitori – rated medium

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-10