about 11 years ago - Comments Off
I’m currently working on a forthcoming book (The Mammoth Book of Brain Workouts, published next year in the UK by Constable & Robinson, and in the US by Running Press), and have been experimenting with something I wrote about briefly a few years ago but hadn’t really tried since – variants on Numberlink.
Numberlink puzzles have More >
about 15 years ago - Comments Off
Diagonal Number Link 8×5 puzzle 2Diagonal Number Link 8×5 puzzle 1
Here’s two more, slightly larger, diagonal number link puzzles – these are 8×5. The problem with diagonal number link is that it’s very hard to constrain the puzzles to a unique solution without making them really quite easy, since lines essentially can’t run parallel for More >
about 15 years ago - 2 comments
Diagonal Number Link 5×5 puzzleDiagonal Number Link 4×4 puzzle
If you thought toroidal number link was tricky, then how about diagonal number link?! In this variant the rules are exactly the same but now you can use diagonal lines as well as horizontal and vertical lines! The diagonal lines can only travel between diagonally-adjacent (diagonally touching) More >
about 15 years ago - 3 comments
Toroidal Number link 8×8 puzzle
Number Link at sizes up to around 10×10 may not necessarily be hugely challenging for everyone, but I bet you now that this puzzle certainly will be! Despite being only 8×8 it is really very difficult indeed. Or perhaps that’s just me – I’d love to hear that someone finds it More >
about 15 years ago - 3 comments
Numberlink 10×10 puzzle 2 (fixed)Numberlink 10×10 puzzle 1
When I first tried a Number link puzzle a few years back I didn’t like it at all – it wasn’t immediately clear how to go about solving it, and I didn’t see how I’d ever find it fun. However jump forward to now and I find them More >
about 15 years ago - 2 comments
Numberlink 20×9 easy puzzle
Over the past few years I’ve made at least one example of pretty much every reasonably popular Japanese number puzzle, but with one notable exception: Number Link. In this puzzle the aim is to draw lines connecting squares with identical values in, but without these lines crossing over or visiting any square More >
about 15 years ago
Good Puzzle.
For me, these puzzles fall more into place by intuition than logic, even though I know there is a logical explanation for what I am doing. I did this puzzle and then went back step by step to prove to myself why I extended the lines the way I did.
However, it still feels fuzzy.
about 15 years ago
This made a nice change although I am still sitting on the fence about this puzzle type. I did both this and the larger puzzle very quickly and only used logic to get the lines started. Either lucky guesses or intuition made the rest fall into place! Not sure how I would cope with a harder puzzle, but it would be interesting to see if this meant that more logic was required to get them going.