Friday Puzzles #93

So no controversy in the difficulty rating this week I hope, as I’m continuing my trend of hopefully introducing new puzzle types to newcomers to the blog (hello!). This week it’s hitori – in a relatively small grid. With this size it’s a bit of a challenge to put out something that squeezes between totally trivial and fiddly lame puzzles that are all too common in the hitori world. I reckon I just about succeed with this one. Enjoy!

    #119 Hitori – rated easy
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #92

So – Kakuro. Let the wall of silence begin! This one is genuinely hard this week too. Not hard in the lame way you get with computer generated Kakuro and you end up having to do lots of adding up with overlapping squares, but certainly hard enough to need a few “painting” steps. You might want to keep your advanced sudoku solving technique handbook with you as well. Enjoy!

    #118 Kakuro – rated medium
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #91

And so, dearest reader, we will once more traverse the logical minefield that is numberlink. I’m 95% sure that the solution I have in mind for this week’s puzzle is rigid to the point of being unique – which is interesting because at first glance it doesn’t seem like it should be the case.

I’m hoping very much that this ambiguity is what actually makes this a rather hard puzzle. Assuming that I haven’t bodged it, this is definitely not an easy, and probably rises above medium too – although I’m not a great judge of numberlink difficulty. And as always with numberlink, I think the most valuable feedback would be directed towards any potential multiple solutions anyway, so I positively encourage you to try and break this rather than worry too much about my grading…

And to think I was going to risk yet another comment free week by doing a kakuro! Maybe next week eh. Enjoy! 

    #117 Numberlink – rated medium

 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11

Friday Puzzles #90

I’d definitely recommend the Guardian as the cream of the current UK newspaper sudoku offerings. There may be harder puzzles available elsewhere, but the Guardian puzzles always solve very cleanly, and often come with really striking designs. These are two aspects of a sudoku that most other newspaper providers manage to nail sporadically at best – and here I’m most disappointed to have to include The Times with its often clunky Puzzler Media supplied offerings.

Anyhow, this week’s puzzle is loosely based on a design that I saw the other day in the Guardian; I’ve added in the whole 1-9 theme, and removed a couple of clues to prevent total triviality. Scanraid is much better than me at grading sudoku, and it reckons it’s a 71 (gentle/easy grade). So there we are. Enjoy!

    #116 Sudoku – rated easy
 

All puzzles © Tom Collyer 2009-11