Dotted Snake by JinHoo Ahn
This is a free “warm-up” puzzle; Season 4 subscribers will see today’s main puzzle in the same style posted at 9:05 AM PT.
or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools with a composite mode where left click inside cell marks as O or X, left click + drag draws line segment; hit tab to also access shading and number entry modes.)
Theme: S is for Snake
Author/Opus: This is the 118th puzzle from our contributing puzzlemaster JinHoo Ahn.
Rules: Locate a numbered snake (a 1-cell wide path) that starts with 1 and goes to 30 (in example, 1 to 15). The snake cannot touch itself, not even diagonally. Every third segment of the snake is marked with gray. Digits outside the grid indicate the number of gray snake segments in that row or column.
See also this example:
Difficulty: 2 stars
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 1:15, Master = 2:15, Expert = 4:30
Solution: PDF and solving animation.
Note: Follow this link for other Snake puzzles. More Snake puzzles and variations can be found in Snake and Variations by Serkan Yürekli.
Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our Week 2 Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.