hutt's puzzle dump

 This puzzle was set on 7/2/26 to contribute to a discussion on whether requiring the two regions to be of equal size contributes any difficult logic. I learned the trick required for the break-in from a hint on a variant sudoku. Since it's not something that I expect the average solver to have in their back pocket, I'm going to outright say here that the idea is to apply Pick's theorem. Variant rule: There must be an equal number of black and white circles. https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?yinyang/v:/6/6/1i000i202000

 I was inspired to make a couple new puzzle types today. I would describe both of them as explosive in the sense that it's really easy for deductions to propagate across the whole grid, like the streaming lights of fireworks filling the night sky. Bandwidth: Shade some more cells so that every shaded region is a rectangle of width 1 and every unshaded region borders a shaded region of the same area as it. penpa link All Stars: Place stars in some cells so that every number counts the amount of stars that can reach it by only traveling upward. Stars cannot be placed on numbers. Also, every internal vertex of the grid must belong to exactly one cell with a star. penpa link Shade some cells blue or red and place stars in some of the blue cells. The blue cells should form one fully connected region and that region should be solved as an All Stars. The rest of the grid should also form one connected region and be solved as a Bandwidth in which the red cells count as shaded. penpa link

 This is my first year having a truly productive summer outside of puzzles. It's a good thing that I've practiced thinking about multiple projects at once. Yet, at times I feel like I have both everything and nothing to do. I end up doing a little bit of anything on any given day. The following puzzles were probably set around the middle of this month. Divide the grid into regions such that every region contains two numbers, which are not in the same row. Every question mark may stand for any whole number. The area of each region should be the upper number divided by the lower number. penpa link

 Recently, I came across the book "Artisanal Sudoku". I must confess that I've been spending most of my offline time working through its puzzles. They accomplish the rare feat of being both logically approachable and aesthetically pleasing, and on multiple occasions I've found myself impressed by some more abstract realizations that I haven't seen before. I especially look forward to the final chapter, but I'm forcing myself to go in order. I think the reason I really enjoy variant sudoku and don't often enjoy classic sudoku is because classic sudoku usually isn't set with rigorous deductions in mind. I'd wager that 98% of any uniformly randomly selected classic sudoku is likely solvable with some combination of pointing sets, digits that can only go in one place because the other eight would cause repetition, and places that can only have one digit because the other eight would cause repetition. This is in stark contrast to the flexibility of vari...

I like how the complexity of this extremely exotic ruleset is surprisingly intuitive when framed with the chosen symbols. It feels easier to set well than Lollipops due to having nearly twice as many possible symbols and slightly larger groups. https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?mrokmrno/8/5/6b2c3d3j3d3c3b2c5 https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?mrokmrno/6/5/b33a34j3i4a3 https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?mrokmrno/7/7/4a4a4a4zd4e4b4a4

 Made and shared on 6/27/26 while thinking about how connectivity works in shading puzzles https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?disco/8/8/ku7ikgi8m2907gubifpsfuv0 https://pzprxs.vercel.app/p?nuritwin/9/9/8l1kbgi2oi142gg7pvivbubsfovovgu