Clockwork Yajilin: Orientation
(Published on 14. February 2024, 01:40 by wisty)
This is the first in a series of Yajilin puzzles that I've been developing! :>
Thank you so much everyone who helped out with testing, especially filuta and chameleon for your constructive feedback!
• Shade some white cells such that no two shaded cells are orthogonally adjacent, and draw a loop that travels orthogonally through all unshaded white cells without intersecting itself or crossing bold borders.
• Clues marked with arrows give the sum of all shaded cells in the given direction, or directions combined, where a cell's value is 1 if it is inside the loop and -1 if it is outside the loop.
• Gears visited by the loop must alternate inside and outside (or vice versa). A gear is considered visited when the loop travels from a cell not touching that gear to a cell touching that gear and no other gears, either directly or through a cell touching multiple gears.
Here is an example of how the rules work:
Clockwork Yajilin series:
• Orientation ◄
• Parallel Motion
• Parity Point
• Challenger
• Blackout Cipher
Solution code: using + and - for inside and outside shaded cells, T for a turn and S for a straight segment: row 5 followed by column 6 (ignore given grey cells)
Comments
on 11. March 2026, 19:02 by wisty
Sorry the touching gears are significantly more confusing than the other entries in this series. Leaving this puzzle up out of respect for those who solved it but removed it from the list on the other pages.
on 30. March 2025, 21:18 by Donatello_86
Very fun and enjoyable, cool combination of constraints
on 3. November 2024, 09:14 by sfushidahardy
Love the gear rule!
on 27. May 2024, 04:58 by wisty
clarified solution code
on 27. May 2024, 02:47 by marsh
Great puzzle, took me longer than anticipated. I recommend to update the solution code explanation to "using + and - for inside and outside shaded cells,..."
_____________
thanks for the suggestion! updated the solution code. glad you enjoyed the puzzle!
on 11. April 2024, 01:42 by Wessel Strijkstra
What a joy to discover this series, great idea and very cute starting puzzle :D Looking forward to the rest!
on 19. March 2024, 22:26 by wisty
added links to full series
on 1. March 2024, 16:51 by szabog
Thank you, interesting idea.
on 21. February 2024, 06:44 by ONeill
cool :)
on 18. February 2024, 21:23 by Piatato
Lovely!
on 17. February 2024, 15:14 by Jesper
Very nice, looking forward to more puzzles
on 17. February 2024, 14:26 by wisty
reworded rule regarding touching gears. thank you KNT for raising the error to my attention, sorry it made it past the testing phase
on 14. February 2024, 17:15 by CHalb
A Yajilin series is a very good idea :).
on 14. February 2024, 14:29 by dumediat
I love this rule set!! Such a fantastic creation, and the visuals are absolutely top notch. Thank you so much for sharing, I can't wait to see more of these! :D
on 14. February 2024, 13:24 by Christounet
Very nice introduction puzzle ! Figuring out the gear rule was not obvious for me but it was good fun after that. Also, very nice visual with the mechanical design. Reminded me of a comics called "Cités obscures". Thanks :)
on 14. February 2024, 11:49 by zzw
Super cool puzzle to start the series off! The rules all work very nicely together.
on 14. February 2024, 01:58 by Myxo
Wonderful puzzle, thank you :) Looking forward to trying the others!
