Pentopia by Prasanna Seshadri
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools).
Theme: Clue Symmetry and Logic
Author/Opus: This is the 60th puzzle from our contributing puzzlemaster Prasanna Seshadri.
Rules: Standard Pentopia rules: Place some of the given pentominoes in the grid so that no pentominoes are in adjacent cells that share an edge or corner. Pentominoes cannot repeat in the grid; rotations and reflections of a pentomino are considered the same shape. The arrow clues indicate all the directions (up, down, left, and right) where the nearest pentominoes are located when looking from that square. (Arrow clues cannot contain pentomino shapes.) Also, see this example:
Answer String: Enter the length in cells of each of the shaded pentomino segments from left to right for the marked rows, starting at the top. Separate each row’s entry from the next with a comma. The example has the solution “21,23”.
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 2:45, Master = 3:15, Expert = 6:30
Solution: PDF
Note: Follow this link for more Pentopia puzzles and this link for other puzzles involving Pentominoes.
I don’t think this is a spoiler and may be obvious to others: You don’t need to use all the shown pentominoes. Humm, that “some” makes the difference but it wasn’t in the version of the rules sent last Sat.
I was unsure about that for a while, trying to work out where certain pentominos would fit! Had a retread of the rules. A nice puzzle, looking forward to working out new strategies as these get harder. Nice solve path.
7:07.Delicious puzzle.
That’s a really fun, new puzzle type (to me at least). Thanks, Prasanna!
I spent a bit over 20 minutes on this before I realized a big pile of cells that I should have determined as unshaded from the very beginning.
What a weird, but very cool, puzzle type.
Small nitpick: rules should possibly indicate that pentominoes cannot cover squares which contain arrows.
The style is originally from Bram de Laat if you’ve not seen it a lot before. He has a lot on his site, but with slightly different formatting. The first Pentopia I received for this site was from Grant Fikes but I bumped it over to the USPC (2013) for a variety of reasons.
Thanks for the history, and for the pointers to additional puzzles.
I do think the arrowheads are a very useful addition to the presentation.
I’ve always really appreciated the “Rules and Info” sections on gmpuzzles.com for giving the history behind various puzzle types. When do new puzzle types merit their own section there? I’d love to see a Pentominous section there, (if nothing else, I was recently looking for a canonical source attributing the inventor of Pentominous—I believe it is Grant Fikes, but it was hard for me to find anything very authoritative for that on the internet).