Castle Wall / A38 Permaculture
(Published on 2. June 2026, 09:00 by Agent)
Rules
- Divide the grid into two orthogonally connected regions. One region is a Castle Wall (Delta), the other is an A38 (Crossing).
- Castle Wall (Delta):
- Draw a directed loop that travels orthogonally through the centers of some empty cells in the Castle Wall region.
- This loop may not enter the A38 region.
- This loop may not cross itself or overlap.
- All squared clues must be in the Castle Wall region, and they cannot be visited by this loop.
- White squares must be inside this loop. Black squares must be outside this loop. Grey squares may be inside or outside this loop.
- A number in a squared clue indicates the amount of steps made towards that cell minus the amount of steps made away from the cell, when completing a single round trip of this loop.
- Region borders block vision. In other words, a squared clue sees all steps up to the first region border (or the edge of the grid) in every cardinal direction (north, east, west, south) from that cell's standpoint.
- A38 (Crossing):
- Draw a directed loop that travels orthogonally through the centers of ALL empty cells in the A38 region.
- This loop may not enter the Castle Wall region.
- This loop may cross itself, but may not turn at an intersection or otherwise overlap.
- The cell with the black circle must be in the A38 region, and is considered the starting point of this loop.
- All non-squared clues must be in the A38 region, and they cannot be visited by this loop.
- A number clue N indicates that the Nth instance of a cell being visited by this loop in the (up to) eight cells surrounding that clue is a pass cell. Note that crosses are visited twice.
- There are no superfluous clues, that is, every such N must correspond to a pass cell.
- A question mark may represent any strictly positive integer, as long as numbers don't repeat in the clue. For example, a "7/?" clue could represent "7/3" or "7/10", but not "7/7".
- Every pass cell is indicated by at least one clue and every clue indicates all pass cells touching it. This loop may not cross itself on a pass cell.
- This loop must then alternate between pass cells and crosses, starting with a pass cell from the black circle onwards and ending with a cross before returning to the black circle.
Example Puzzle (10x10)
Main Puzzle (17x20)
Solution code: The number of turns of both loops combined in each row, from top to bottom.
Last changed on -
Solved by cyddrdrd, Oripy, yttrio, Jesper, MaizeGator, CutieRainbow, itweb, Gqsp
Comments
yesterday, 00:09 by Gqsp
Amazing puzzle !
on 3. June 2026, 03:03 by MaizeGator
Agent is back to the usual subversive tricks resulting in masterpiece puzzles. I particularly liked the beginning of the endgame on this one; a pretty minor deduction that seemed impossible to satisfy leading to an avalanche of progress.
on 3. June 2026, 00:30 by Jesper
Wonderful!
on 2. June 2026, 18:59 by yttrio
A very tricky, but amazingly satisfying puzzle to solve!
on 2. June 2026, 09:55 by cyddrdrd
Fantastic logic from the beginning to the very end!