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.
I came across this one while perusing puzzles by Clover from a few years ago. Semi-killer, she called it, and it should be easy. Instead of X in N digits, it’s X in N-1 digits. Only then there’s the question of any given digits. Are they in or out? Maybe it’s obvious, maybe it’s not.
Not very fun fact: The very day I created this puzzle, a few hours later, my daughter was in a traffic collision that ended up relying on her comprehensive car insurance coverage to resolve. Everybody was fine, though only one car drove away from the scene. And no, she didn’t know I’d given this puzzle this name. Just an un-lucky coincidence.
I find lockout lines strange, and struggle to develop intuition about them. They were launched with a packet full of puzzles, and I think I solved the the dozenth with the same timid squint as the first. Still, I think this puzzle might help, relying as it does on cages.
The challenges in creating these larger puzzles are multiple. I could have created more than four single-grid puzzles in less time than it took to create this one, in part because each change required me to re-solve the puzzle from the start, to be sure I hadn’t broken anything unexpectedly. Still, the satisfaction of a working gattai that also follows the rules I’ve set for myself, it’s worth spending the extra time on one out of every dozen puzzles or so.
The standard wording of the Clones rule allows for multiple sets of clones, but this puzzle includes six copies of a single shaded area. Coloring is fun for children and adults alike!
We don’t need no education / Wе don’t need no thought control // All in all, it was just a brick in the wall / All in all, it was all just bricks in the wall //
Overlapping grids are interesting, but I thought: why always align on thick region borders? What if I split them offset? The answer is: it is a much more difficult puzzle to set, but makes solving more interesting. Trivia: When I set my normal logical auto-solver to the settings I like to use for testing, it gets “stuck” at one particular step. So if you solve the puzzle without using the walkthrough, you’ve done a better job than my logical auto-solver! Even more trivial: The renban lines are almost perfectly symmetrical, but there are two differences.
Sometimes people just “click,” best friends forever. It happens to digits, too! In some columns, and some rows, certain pairs of digits are inseparable.
It could have been named “Son of DoubleDoku” or “2 Double 2 Doku” or even “DoubleDoku: Folie à Deux,” but whatever it’s called, it’s a sequel to DoubleDoku.
More of these combo cages that act as “German Whispers” lines. In this case, some of them are square, and adjacent digits means orthogonally-adjacent, since there’s no way a square would work otherwise. For extra fun, very few of the cages have totals.