Consecutive Skyscraper puzzle

It’s been a while since I posted a new puzzle here, what with all the excitement about Sudoku Xtra magazine, so I thought I had better do something about that right now!  So to that end, here’s something a little bit unusual – a Consecutive Skyscraper puzzle.

Now Consecutive Skyscraper may sound like a brief description of downtown Manhattan, but in fact it’s a puzzle with pretty simple rules:

  • Place 1 to 8 in each row and column
  • Obey the Skyscraper constraints: each number outside the grid reveals the number of ‘visible’ digits looking along that row/column, where higher digits obscure all lower ones
  • White bars between squares reveal all consecutive squares – those where the difference is one (such as 1&2, 2&3, etc).  Squares without white bars between are not consecutive

If that isn’t detailed enough for you, try clicking the relevant links on the right, or here’s what I wrote back in April about Skyscraper puzzles:

In a Skyscraper puzzle you place numbers in a grid whilst obeying ‘building height’ constraints around the edge. These building height constraints specify the number of notional buildings you could see whilst standing at the edge of the puzzle and looking in, whereby a taller building completely hides the view of any shorter building.  The idea is that a digit ‘1′ in the grid is a building 1 storey high; a digit ‘2′ in the grid is a building 2 storeys high, and so on.

If you had a very simple 3×3 Skyscraper puzzle, here’s the potential solutions to each of the possible clues:

  • 1: can be either 3 2 1 or 3 1 2, with the ‘3′ hiding both the other digits
  • 2: can be 1 3 2 or 2 3 1 or 2 1 3.
  • 3: can only be 1 2 3 because this is the only way to see all of the buildings.

Good luck! :)