Accidental Clue Symmetry

Over the last couple of months I completely forgot to post more blogs! I moved house and got out of the swing of it despite actually continuing to draw kakuros and other puzzles. I thought today I’d go back to the Renzoku because it’s such a satisfying puzzle to logic through as a player that it just feels nice to create something like that for someone.

So I wanted to start in the middle and create a little run of digits for the player. What this ended up creating was a symmetrical clue system that cascades in on itself.

Focusing on that centre point allowed me to define the third row as having no horizontal clues. I learned this from previous attempts that if you don’t want to have grids that are full of dots in between cells, you have to make a conscious effort to block off areas from having any connections.

Because of how the numbers can’t repeat on rows and columns, as soon as you start to fill out a couple rows of numbers, it then becomes an exercise not in planning a puzzle but in filling in the grid so that it doesn’t have repeating numbers.

What came about through this was the interesting symmetry that we see above where the columns on either edge have their own run of 4 consecutive numbers. Unless the digits in the sequence are given as starting clues it doesn’t necessarily make an easy puzzle. But I was interested in that symmetry and how it cascades towards the centre.

I wanted to give the opposing corners first because it cascaded nicely. After you resolve each of those columns it just nicely folds in on itself with multiple points to easily solve through consecutive elimination. For example on the fifth row, the numbers which remain to be put in are 3 and 5. Either of those could be placed beside the 4 to make that cell connection true but if you place a 5, then the 3 has to be placed beside the 2 which won’t work as there is no dot between the 2 and that cell.

I think it might be interesting to take the same number configuration and dots, but change the given number clues to see how this might alter the solving logic for the player. I think in addition to that I might also work on a larger grid to see what the structure and design process would be like for that!