Puzzletober 2026: Zip
A vast moat encircles Neward's castle. Felix looks for a drawbridge and notices that it's been broken from the inner end. After he asks Terra if the bridge was broken before she left, she grows vines from the ground beneath them that cross the chasm. She claims, "I have to use a lot of mana. You do not see some of the vines. Those vines dig into the ground, and help to make these vines stick." Once the exposed vines reach the other end, they become stiff. To avoid suspicion, Terra walks effortlessly across a tightrope and through the castle gate, leaving the explorers to brainstorm a safe way across on their own. Renn thinks about trying to zip across.
Rules: Solve as a Latin square. Diamonds are the centers of Zipper Sudoku clues: lines extend in two directions in equal distances from each clue, and cells connected equidistant from the center of a diamond sum to the digit in the diamond. The lines may only move horizontally and vertically and no cell will be visited more than once by the clue lines. For each clue, one line will completely avoid the water and one line will only pass over water, ending by exiting the water on the right side.
The lines connected to the upper diamond have a combined length of 10.
