Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

It's been far too long since my last LMD upload. There are a few reasons for this, notably that all my setting energy has gone into a race with LMDemasi to set the most "snacks" for a recent Scojo prompt. We've both now made over 60 mini puzzles, so once the creative juices dry up, I'll compile my best ones and publish them to LMD!

In the meantime, however, here is a puzzle that arguably counts as a snack in the sense that it's a much smaller and easier version of a larger puzzle, but when that larger puzzle is this absolute beast, perhaps I stretched the definition of "snack" a little too far! It goes without saying that enormous credit is owed to The Book Wyrm for inspiring this puzzle.

I've since recorded a quick solution guide, which aims to prove that it can be done in a series of relatively manageable steps... but I don't know how convincing it is!



• Somewhere in the grid there is a 3x3 box, the position of which must be determined by the solver, and inside which standard chaos construction rules apply.
• Chaos Construction: Divide the grid in 3 regions, each made of 3 orthogonally connected cells. Place the digits 1-3 once each in every row, column and region.
• Inner Japanese Sums: some of the cells in the grid outside the box contain numbers which are Japanese Sums-style clues indicating the sums of contiguous runs of cells within the row or column of the inner box that are in the same region.
• All clues for every row and column of the inner box must be filled in as numbers in the cells outside the box, in the correct order, in the corresponding row or column. Clues can be on either side (or both) of the inner box (the clues on either side of the box are read as one string, skipping over the inner box, top down or left to right). There are no gaps between clues or between a clue and the inner box. Every cell outside the box and not containing a clue must be empty.
• Outer Japanese Sums: The clues outside the grid are Japanese Sums-style clues indicating the sums of contiguous runs of cells within that row or column that all have the same parity (odd or even).
• Note: An empty cell separates the sums of the outside clues, so if two cells of the same parity have an empty cell between them they are in different sums.
• All outside clues are given modulo 4 (i.e. the given value is the remainder if the actual value was divided by 4).
• All outside clues are given in non-decreasing order (with the largest clues closest to the grid).
• All outside clues have been ciphered, i.e. the letters A, B and C each represent a different digit from 0-3.