Killer Cages are common in variant puzzles. Although some cages have been distorted and don’t follow standard “Killer Cages” rules, most are standard.
Digits in cages do not repeat, and sum to the total in the top-left corner of the cage, if given. If not given, they just do not repeat.
There are variants like Semi-Killer cages and Gravity Cages that use cages for their own purposes, but generally, Killer Cages just have the two conditions: no repeats, sum to a total.
Some combinations of constraints are difficult for people with colorblindness. So there’s a version of this puzzle as I initially intended it, but a friend with deuteranopia very patiently reviewed more than a half-dozen different attempts to ensure the pink and green cages were easily distinguishable, and this is the version that was clearest for him. So it’s the official version.
I really love these “fully-caged” puzzles. Some day I think I could publish one or two of these a week and still enjoy the process. I mean, I do have to pick a color for the untotaled cages, but if I did more of these, I’d just cycle through a short list, repeating colors. And sometimes a puzzle could have a bare minimum number of totaled cages, unlike this one, which has a few more than absolutely necessary–although not many more.
These net-shaped extra regions aren’t very compact, so it’s challenging to fit very many of them into a standard 9x9 grid. But I love the color!
Very repetitious. Seven cells of nine. Very repetitious. Same pattern many times. When I don’t tell you what song I’m thinking of, and also change the lyrics, I assume it doesn’t make much sense at all.
I don’t think of fog as something that echoes. If an empty room filled with fog, I think shouting would end up swallowed, the sound absorbed and reflected by the fog rather than bouncing off far walls. I don’t actually know, and if I looked for answers on the internet, what would I write about here? If you know the answer, shout it into the void, and perhaps it will reach me.
I’ve solved more than 1200 computer-generated Killer Sudoku puzzles on a daily site, but there’s a definite sameness to them. Just having some cages without totals makes these puzzles different, and I enjoy each one as much as a dozen on the daily site. I would say that, though, wouldn’t I?
Happy Birthday to the best mom I’ve ever had! Don’t worry, I gave no hints about the year you were born, nor how old young that makes you this year. No hints at all. And no, I’m not sure why I decided that’s the shape a cake should be. I hope you enjoy the puzzle nonetheless!
A butterfly? Some other insect? A more-symmetrical insect than exists in nature on this planet? They look like wings to me!
I found this constraint in a puzzle by Clover from a few years back. In Touchy Sudoku, every single digit is next to a numeric neighbor, which seems like it could be like Renban, except most digits have two neighbors, and only needs to be next to one. Which seems like it could lead to dominoes, except most digits can be neighbor to two different digits, or to two instance of itself. So it’s not quite like anything else, it’s Touchy Sudoku!
Doesn’t this grid look like the Tower of Hanoi puzzle? I’m going with that because Fisher-Price seems to market “Rock-a-Stack” under different names around the world, even though I colored the cages and now the pyramid regions look even more like the Fisher-Price rings/donuts.