Leading With Clue Intersections

I wanted to go back to Kakuros again and hone my skills on creating these particular puzzles. Once again I took a pre-created structure so I could focus on the constructing part.

I started off with some analysis in photoshop where I highlight areas that are structurally interesting that help give ideas to how clue variations might be constructed. I identified this square pattern of the largest intersections that was such a large feature in the last Kakuro. I decided to use the same min/maxing with these clues to keep things a bit simpler for me.

The next thing I identified was that due to the symmetry of the grid there are these dual intersections at each corner. I wanted to use these 4 cell intersections as the starting point of the puzzle. So I made each of the puzzles a minimum and maximum value clue each with only one solution where the intersecting cell is forced.

So I constrained the rest of the puzzle such that the player couldn’t make any headway until they identified this intersection trick. The player can still solve some things like the 16/17 2 cells in the bottom left hand corner but it doesn’t unlock the rest of the puzzle as the 4 cell intersections do. From there it was just a case of making sure that the player could use different types of solving logic to go through the puzzle. Most of it is observing various intersecting maximum and minimum value clues and what digits could possibly be placed in certain positions but I did manage to get a detached cross section clue in there.

Overall I’m quite happy with this one. Most importantly I was able to maintain my focus purely on this for a couple of hours straight which has been a struggle recently. So it’s been a good test of that and now on to the next one I suppose!