XV

Na na na na na-na! (Getting foggy with it) Fog puzzles do one thing very well: they provide focus. By obscuring most of the grid, they narrow down where you need to look to get started. In this case: to eight cells out of 81.

I suspect this title only works in US dialects, and possibly not all of them. I believe I pronounce “Roman” and “Roamin’” exactly the same way, although that’s probably a result of me mispronouncing the second syllable of one or the other.

I tagged this as an XV puzzle, but it’s more than that. It’s not just 5 or 10, or even 15 clues, it’s many arbitrary numbers, all expressed as Roman numerals.

Sometimes the most difficult part of solving a puzzle is deciding which colors to use. Do you color pairs, individual digits, or high/low? I use yellow for low and sky blue for high, personally This is a hint that coloring will be helpful with this puzzle, and possibly more than one kind!

There are eight L shapes in this puzzle. No, I didn’t forget the green ones: two of the peach ones aren’t L-shaped. There are ten lines bent into right angles, but two are bent in a different direction from the others. And I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not an L if the horizontal bit is longer than the vertical bit!

Can I interest you in a fine manufactured home? It’s so wide! Almost, but not quite, twice as wide as a single-wide. In fact, it’s 1.67 times as wide, and 1.33 times as tall as a normal 9x9 Sudoku.

It’s an XV Thermo puzzle, except you can’t see it all at once. You can see just enough to fill in one cell, after which you’ll be able to see more. This is the second of four puzzles exploring a guided solve path using Fog of War.

It’s a Full House of Zs. It turns out there are a few different ways to arrange the things, and rotating a Z 180º gives you… a Z.

It may seem like a lot of constraints, but it's a Samurai Sudoku, so you should only have deal with one or two at a time.

It’s the corners that matter, so you can’t really cut them from the puzzle and expect good results.