Hello, and welcome to Puzzles for Progress! This week, three puzzles with visual themes I think are neat. Hopefully solving does them justice.
But first, it's Puzzles fordle Progress, the custom seven-letter wordle. This is another one suggested by music enthusiast Allison, and I think it's on the tricky side: solve
The first puzzle today is a relatively easy Simple Loop puzzle. I tried to make the black squares spell SL. The L ended up looking more like an upside-down question mark. Perhaps this is a metaphor for something — maybe puzzles, where the question mark represents the mystery of the solution, and the upside-down-ness represents the lateral thinking required to get there. I still wish it was an actual L though.
This KenKen's visual theme is based on a mathematical coincidence: 6 squared happens to also equal 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8. Therefore, I thought it'd be cool to make a 6x6 KenKen with regions of every size from 1 to 8. It took some trial and error, designing and redesigning layouts, but I got there in the end! Until I finished it, I didn't even realize two incredible coincidences: this puzzle, regions themed around 1–8, was first of all the 18th KenKen in my Google Drive, and second of all releasing in Issue #118.
Finally, it's convention to make crosswords symmetrical. The Spiral is perhaps my favorite variety word puzzle type — but due to its unusual wound-up shape, I've never made one with proper symmetry! I decided to rectify that in this symmetrical Spiral, whose inward answers and outward answers both have 180-degree rotational symmetry.
I hope you enjoy!
(If you find any errors, it’s possible that I’ve fixed them on the site. If I haven't, please tell me about them!)
I'd like to thank my mom, thetearex15, Wessel Strijkstra, MicroStudy, and 3good5you for testing.
