Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

I've been pretty bored of setting sudoku puzzles recently because of limited popularity, so I feel like I should visit some other ideas that disguise as trials of myself into setting more pencil puzzles.

In this edition of "I Made A Pencil Puzzle" (or I.M.A.P.P for short), inspired by the direct previous tapa puzzle, I got a cool idea for a hybrid between Japanese Sum and Tapa, and eventually I got a nice result at the end after like two weeks.

This is certainly one of the harder puzzles that I've set in a long while but I'm also proud of how much interesting stuff it produces overall. This one isn't actually meant for any special event, but it's rather just me playing around with wildcard clue and stuff like that.
I hope everyone will enjoy this one too!




Rules:

- In the given 12x12 grid, shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area and no 2x2 area is entirely shaded. The diamond connects two cells with the same type of shading (either shaded or unshaded).

-A cell with clue[s] cannot be shaded and each clue within a cell represents the length of a shaded group surrounding that clue. If there are two or more clues within a cell, each group of shaded cells must be separated by a group of unshaded cell.

- For the remaining unshaded cells, write into each of them a digit from 1-9 so that digits don't repeat in any row or column.
For the purpose of this puzzle, a cell with multiple clues will contain digit that is the total of all clues within that cell.

- Japanese Sums: The outside clues of a row/column indicate the sums of the contiguous unshaded groups in that row/column; to allow this, there must be at least one shaded cell between each pair of unshaded groups. For each row/column, either all clues or no clues are provided. (The order shall be left to right for rows and top to bottom for columns)

- All of the clues have been ciphered and it's required to deduce which letter will correspond to which digit.
+ Letters A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,J,K form a set of digits from 0-9. Same letters will correspond to same digits and different letters will correspond to different digits.
+ Letter I is a wildcard clue: letter I also contains any digit from 0-9, but it represents different value each time it appears in the grid.
+ A question mark (?) can be any digit from 0-9 but it can't be zero (0) if it acts as a single digit clue. For the purpose of two digits number, the first digit is never zero (0).
+ A "..." clue indicates an arbitrary number of Japanese sum clues (which may be zero, one or more than one clue).



The puzzle can be solved online in Penpa link or Sudokupad. The answer check in the penpa link will trigger once all the correct digits are entered, including the letters table as well. The table for letter I is to keep track of which 'I' has been used after certain parts of the solve.

Good luck and have fun solving!