ooof, sudoku is one of the worst things to develop tetris effect for, i need to mix it up with other nikoli puzzles
i just want to email ceo -at- nikoli.com and beg them to release some of their puzzles as ebooks, they wouldn't even have to localize them for english speakers for me to throw money at them for it
- nurikabe (i love to build a wall)
- hashiwokakero (let's build bridges!!!)
- kakuro (addition crosswords)
- akari (minesweeper with light bulbs)
- sudoku (sorry bud :/)
these are just the five i've tried so far (really excited to try slitherlink and yajilin in particular), and i've only done easy versions of these (especially hashi and akari) so i may have different feelings once i start needing more advanced strats
click below to read a list of nine puzzles that you may or may not have heard of
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yajilin. YAJILIN. i love this, it's like if you combined a funny kind of nonogram with those pokemon ice tile puzzles where you have to step on each tile exactly once, with a dose of topology cause you're drawing loops. in general i'm really enjoying the loop-drawing puzzles and yajilin is my favorite loop-drawing puzzle rn.
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masyu, another looper! this time the lues (looping clues) are just a bunch of black and white circles/"pearls" that encode pretty abstract constraints on how the loop needs to pass through them. i've only really been doing easy ones so far but it's cozy and nice to take a break from numbers.
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nurikabe. i still like to build a wall :)
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slitherlink, more loops! this time the looping constraints are minesweeper style "i need to touch exactly this many loop segments" number clues. i'm pretty sure a less fun, non-looped version of this is in jblow's the witness.
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hashiwokakero! bridge building is still cozy, although i've started dipping into some very slightly harder puzzles than before that don't quite solve themselves. fun to think about how you would express the very visual, geometric constraints in this more abstractly.
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hitori. it's like, what if someone tried to do a magic square/sudoku, but they filled it out wrong, and you gotta black out their squares to make it right, and also there are connectedness constraints on how you do that because it's nikoli. if i'm gonna look at a dense grid of numbers, let it be hitori.
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akari, it's minesweeper with lightbulbs! we're still firmly in "i'm having fun :)" territory in these rankings. i feel like i'm playing, like, correspondence co-op bomberman.
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kakuro. i probably need to start doing harder versions of these, cause on a 5x5 grid you just eventually get to the point where each clue immediately conjures up the partition of the number you need and it starts feeling like a straight up magic square puzzle with extra steps.
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sudoku. number place. place those numbers.
