Mystery of Osaka
(Published on 13. March 2025, 11:45 by .proxz14)
Coral: Shade some empty cells to create a single connected wall (the “Coral”). The shaded cells cannot form a 2×2 square anywhere in the grid, and each unshaded cell block must be connected to an edge of the grid. All clued cells are unshaded, and indicate the amount of coral (shaded) cells found in their row and column combined.
Japanese Sums/Products: Place digits from 1-9 into every unshaded cell (including clued cells, if the clued cell is a letter, the digit to be placed is the corresponding cipher digit) such that no digit repeats in a row, column or 3x3 box. Digits can't live in shaded cells. Clues outside the grid are either Japanese Sums clues which indicate the sums of the connected unshaded blocks, in correct order, or Japanese Products clues which indicate the products of the connected unshaded blocks in correct order. Within a row/column, the clue type is consistent. The solver may determine which set of clues are given for a row/column. A ? stands for any digit 0-9, but for a double digit clue, the leading ? cannot be a zero. For each row or column, either all or no clues are provided.
Cipher: Clues are ciphered, where each unique letter stands for a different digit 0-9.
Play on SudokuPad
Solution code: Row 2 (use 0 for shaded cells), followed by X and Y on cipher.
Comments
on 18. July 2025, 11:51 by Christounet
Great fun! Thanks :)
on 20. June 2025, 13:49 by AnnaTh
Fantastic puzzle! So much fun!
on 12. May 2025, 15:07 by Agent
Cool puzzle! It became a lot easier once I remembered that the shaded cells had to form a Coral.
on 3. May 2025, 21:50 by Myxo
Lovely puzzle!
on 9. April 2025, 18:27 by peacherwu2
I bet 6th or 5th grader does faster than me as I am only trained to do single digit adding. LOL
on 23. March 2025, 18:41 by kamkam
Wow this was tricky ! I got lost between those products and those sums, and the last part (top rows) were very difficult. This is a 5 stars puzzle according to me. I enjoyed this puzzle a lot !
.proxz14's response: I'm glad you did! this was a very fun one to set, and a tricky one to rate honestly, I get the 5 stars rating. Thanks for the comment :)
on 21. March 2025, 21:23 by ghaia
cute break in, the ending was unnecessarily hard tho jdfkhsjdafhak I struggled way too much
otherwise, it's a very cute and satisfying puzzle :) don't underestimate the difficulty tho. You've been warned xd
.proxz14's response: Hey a trickster's gotta play his last trick before giving up, right? Otherwise, its a very cute and satisfying comment :)
on 15. March 2025, 14:42 by puzzler05
Incredibly well constructed, must do
.proxz14's response: thanks a lot!!
