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Puzzle Time: Tessera

Friday, 6th March 2020 ◆ After moments, one and I see intricate tiling (6) ◆ Comments (3) Puzzle time  

For today's Puzzle Time, I pull Tessera from my ever-growing graveyard of incomplete games. It's one I started making some time back, when I was learning Cocos2d-x, but as is often the case I never got round to finishing it. Regrets aside, I think it makes a perfect blog entry - so here is an example level, recreated with Javascript!

  1. Each cell can be coloured either red or blue
  2. A region is a group of orthogonally connected cells of the same colour (diagonals don't connect cells)
  3. If a cell contains a number, the region containing the cell must be of that size

Tap on the grid below to colour cells, and tap and hold to remove a colour.

I think this is quite an elegant puzzle. If we assume the top-left cell is, say, blue, then the grid has exactly one solution. Little numbers are quite easy to fill in, but for large numbers it becomes a bit tougher.

I am unsure what possible deductions could be made about this puzzle yet, but I am interested to see how few numbers you can get away with putting on the grid. From my limited tinkerings, if you put large numbers in one area of the map, there are usually multiple solutions...

As always, good luck!

Comments

sunil. ◆ Monday, 9th March 2020 at 22:27

I did a very bad job of explaining how this puzzle works. Here's an example of a valid configuration:

Valid configuration Valid configuration

A number will become underlined when its size is correct.

seth ◆ Friday, 13th March 2020 at 08:23

This one is a lot of fun! I found it much easier than Crossclue thankfully.

Does it get easier or harder to solve with more numbers on the grid?

sunil. ◆ Saturday, 14th March 2020 at 10:56

I'm glad you liked it! With more numbers, and therefore smaller regions, I think it gets easier to solve.