Snake Egg by Serkan Yürekli
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 shades square, left click + drag draws line segment, right click inside cell adds dot, and right click on cell edge adds an x; hit tab to also access a shading mode that can be used for answer entry.)
Theme: Odd Regions
Author/Opus: This is the 481st puzzle from our managing editor Serkan Yürekli.
Rules: Draw a snake (a 1 cell-wide path) in the grid whose head and tail are given by circled cells. The snake can touch itself diagonally, but cannot touch itself orthogonally or revisit any square. Besides the snake, the remaining cells must form exactly nine white areas, one of each size from 1 to 9 (in example, 1 to 5). Numbers in the grid must be part of white areas of the indicated size.
See also this example:
Difficulty: 1.5 stars
Time Standards (highlight to view): Grandmaster = 1:00, Master = 1:45, Expert = 3:30
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.