It’s so easy to get started. So many dots arranged so carefully. And then… well, this cell, let’s make it orange, and then we need three more orange cells in these three rows, but we also need two green cells in two of those rows, so…
I see your 159, and raise you 3 and 7. My hand is strong, so I’m willing to keep raising if I have to. This one also had some testing contoversy, with difficulty estimates and solve times ranging widely.
It’s a big one, and it’s anchored by Gravity Cages at the bottom. While these cages don’t directly affect anything else in the puzzle, I like to imagine they’ll combine to form a black hole, pulling everything in all four grids into a single cell.
When the arrow points to the bottom right, the cage is a Young Tableau, but something’s gone strange in this puzzle, and gravity seems to be pulling every which way. Some cages are upside-down or reversed or both, but the arrow always points in the direction of strongest gravitational attraction.
With the largest digit in the bottom right corner, these are also known as Young Tableaux. I’ve added an indicator arrow both as a reminder of the Young Tableaux constraint, and as a hint that future Gravity Cages might not always have the arrow point in that direction.
In testing, this puzzle provoked some debate. This grid can seem quite complicated, but those “renban arrows” are far more limiting than they might first appear.
Not a Sudoku-X puzzle, since only the “positive” diagonal is marked. Still, the unmarked diagonal is interesting. And not just on a global scale!
The shapes look a bit like Oklahoma if you’re generous, and because people who illegally rushed in to claim land ahead of the official opening of the legal theft of Oklahoma land in 1889 were labeled “Sooners,” a name the University of Oklahoma adopted for all future sports teams in 1908. I spend all my creativity on the puzzles, leaving nothing for the names.
The world is full of things to measure, and scales for reporting those measurements. Some are more rational than others, some are more human-oriented than others, and some are older than others, but none of them involve thermometers that sometimes rise and sometimes don’t. This puzzle does, though!
Continued research into the issue of Anti-Quadruples has exposed why we had not seen them before. They are best detected not by observing them directly, but by observing what isn’t there.