Yajilin ➡️⬛

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    It's time I cover the genre... I can't postpone it much longer...

 

    Yajilin is a mixed loop/shading type puzzle. Being one of the most popular genres out there, it is packed with extensive logic about loops. Here are the rules :

Shade some cells on the board, and draw a single loop that goes through all remaining cells.

1. The loop cannot branch off or cross itself.

2. Shaded cells cannot be orthogonally adjacent.

3. Cells with numbers or question marks cannot be shaded, and are not part of the loop.

4. A number indicates the amount of shaded cells in the given direction.

Rules taken from puzz.link -> Click here for a solved example.

    Be careful that a clue is not considered a shaded cell (seems obvious but I saw someone missinterpretating this rule once), and keep in mind you are going through all remaining cells with a unique loop.

    Why am I complaining about doing this post ? Simply put, I am awful at Yajilin. So bad, I can't process grids higher than "easy" difficulty without taking at least half an hour to solve them. Sometimes I get a illumination in contests, but usually my brain turns to mush trying a bajillion possibilities, because the genre seems too subtle for me. This post took some time to prepare, as creating puzzles with adequate toughness was really tricky to find, so I got help from a software to make them unique, and tested them to make sure it's still doable So yes, the indicated difficulty is very much experimental. Of course, I trained a lot on the puzz.link database (which is drowning in Yajilin puzzles) to be able to create and solve the ones for today. The 3 puzzles offer a nice range of difficulties and logic, but don't worry if you only manage to do the first one.

Puzzle 1 (easy)

Puzzle 2 (medium)

Puzzle 3 (hard)