Logic Masters Deutschland e.V.

I created this puzzle for Scojo's Secret Impostor event, which works like this: the first week, every participant sets a puzzle in their own style, and the second week everyone draws someone that they will try to impersonate. I drew yttrio, and attempted to set a puzzle that could have been set by him. After Scojo solved both puzzles on stream, his Twitch viewers voted on which puzzle that they thought was actually set by yttrio. I am happy to report that I somehow won the vote by a small margin, despite yttrio sending in a very clean and fun, classic yttrioesque puzzle to represent himself. I will point you all to yttrio's puzzle when/if he publishes it.

This is the first puzzle that I set trying to impersonate yttrio, but it is not the one that I ended up sending in. I am in many ways happy with this puzzle, but in the end I decided that the solvepath didn't feel quite right for an yttrio puzzle. Subsequently I created and sent in this puzzle instead. Feel free to let me know if you agree with my decision or not!

Rules:

Normal Sudoku rules apply.

Yin Yang: Shade some cells such that all shaded cells are orthogonally connected, all unshaded cells are orthogonally connected, and no 2x2 area is fully shaded or fully unshaded.

Shaded cells act as fortress (maximum) cells: shaded cells must be larger than all orthogonal neighbors of the cell that are unshaded.

XV: Digits separated by an X must sum to 10. Digits separated by a V must sum to 5. Not all possible Xs and Vs are necessarily given.

For each X and V, one of the digits touching the X or V is shaded, while the other is unshaded.

Penpa
Sudokupad