Happy Puzzling by Oyler
In 2024, The Wizards of OZ were invited to set the puzzles for the Ritangle school’s competition for 2025. Zag had set a crossnumber puzzle for the previous year’s competition and it had been well received. I scoured my back catalogue looking for something that would be suitable and found a series of puzzles that I’d set which were based on The Happy Puzzle Company’s Genius Square.
I know it’s far too early to be thinking of Christmas presents yet but if you enjoyed Happy Puzzling then I can recommend Genius Square. It is a race game for two players. Each player has a 6×6 board with rows labelled A to F and the columns 1 to 6 and one of each of the nine pieces. There are seven dice with labels such as D3, F2 etc. The dice are rolled and blocking pieces (cylinders) are placed in these cells. Players then race to see who is first to place all their pieces on the board. The remarkable thing is that there is always a solution. It is great fun and promotes spatial awareness.
I bought a copy years ago when it was first launched and realised that it would be perfect for a crossnumber puzzle as there were nine pieces that could be assigned to a different digit with that digit appearing in each cell of the shape and the blocking pieces could be zero.
One of the setting methods that’s gained popularity of late is entries given in ascending order. This has the benefit of obscuring where entries go to a certain extent. I went with that and used clues like palindrome which all must have the same digit. If they don’t then there is no way to join up the ends.
Of course, I went overboard and set quite a few puzzles using this idea. One appeared in CQ and another in the Ritangle competition. You may have noted some similarities with Child’s Play’s Battleships in the April 2023 Magpie.
The thing about these types of puzzles is seeing just how much information you need to give and what can be left out. AJ discovered that my clue m (sum of its factors is a perfect square) was unnecessary so that was changed to Unclued. Another solver contacted me and has proved, using a computer, that clues t, w and x were unnecessary as well! That would probably have upped the difficulty level too much for my liking.
I hope solvers enjoyed the puzzle as I certainly enjoyed setting it. Get your Christmas or birthday presents now!