This puzzle is incredibly approachable for someone who hasn't done deconstruction puzzles before! It's possible to do this one without the starter Simon used, instead using the rule that cages must have digits from the start.
Someday Simon is going to solve one of these deconstruction puzzles and it will have a 3 in the far corner position of a corner box that is not in its extreme placement (equivalent to r3c1 or r11c9of today's layout) and we will have to have a deep philosophical conversation of what truly counts as a "3 in the corner"
(Also if you do count that situation as songworthy the deconstruction variant rule offers the rare opportunity to set a variant sudoku with up to four "3 in the corner" moments!)
16:15 The way i've always interpreted the rules in deconstruction puzzles is that "cages show the sum of their digits" is a definitive statement to be taken as a given. So if there's a cage with a 29 it has to have at least four cells occupied by regions. The 16 and the 10 have to have at least two cells each in them to meet their defined summed value, and there's only one way to accomplish that for both of them.
15:30 finish. I love how the "river" flowed through the puzzle and set the first six boxes immediately. Identifying that all cages needed to have numbers makes quick work of the last three boxes. A very nice puzzle, and not too tricky!
"Yes, I know: never, ever speak to me at parties; it never goes well." Nothing makes me want to speak to Simon at a party more than when he says this 😅
I didn't know the trick for an 11x11 puzzle, but realizing the bottom-left corner cage needed at least 2 digits and just 2 digits was impossible was enough to get me rolling.
I forgot that cages cannot contain the same number, which made the solve A LOT more difficult, but I made it in the end! Love these more human puzzles!
i followed this rule correctly all the way to the end but for the 28 cage i somehow forgot about it and then had 2 possible solutions that both would work and it took me way too long to figure out what my mistake was. strange thing is that i thought "i probably missed it because it's so stretched and going through 3 boxes and whatnot" but not for a second did i doubt that the 6 cage had to be 1/2/3.. odd how the mind works sometimes
Not knowing the trick, I had to look at the solve video up to the point where Simon explained how the six cage had to work, before continuing on my own. My mind didn't fathom the cages might have their cells separated like that, so thanks, Simon, for the video and your (as always) clear way of explaining things. Thank you James, for the puzzle!
8:14. A very approachable take on the deconstruction puzzles. Just seeing that 20-cell 6-cage brought a smile to my face before even starting on the solve. 🙂
this is the most beautiful puzzle I have ever seen and I say this with full responsibility as a person who has already solved many wonderful sudokus featured on this channel
My parents always had a subscription to the New York Times. One of may great joys as a child was getting the Sunday Times and trying to find all the Ninas in Al Hirschfeld’s charicatures. I love that your Times calls their little Easter eggs Ninas. It’s a great tribute to Al.
Thank you Simon for another great solve. I'd really like for you to display the satisfying "uneven" symmetries in puzzles like these after the solve. I'm sure James Sinclair has put a lot of effort to develop them and those puzzles in which the setters are committed to following through with it are the most satisfying. Cheers from Germany
wow, James is on fire! that was brilliant and so fun. I think approachable puzzles have somehow gotten a bad name, but I personally don't have time to struggle with an hour long (or longer) puzzle every day, so it's nice to have easier puzzles that are also still fantastically beautiful. thanks James and Simon
I find disconstruction puzzles hideously difficult. So solving this in 00:20:22 shocked me. Multiple moments of chuckling as I went. Had I not learnt the secrets of sodoku from this channel(such as the importance of 9 particular cells out of the 11 x 11), this would be impossible. Brilliant puzzle, looking forwards to watching Simon attempt it.... now.
18:43 for me - Once I start with the theorem that for an 11x11 deconstruction, you can place one cell that must be somewhere in each 3x3 box, I saw that 3 of those lied within the 6 cage, and combined that with the fact that every cage must be reached in part by a 3x3 box in some way, the positioning of the 3x3 boxes was easy and felt very natural.
32:29. I'm so proud of myself. I don't know (yet) if I followed the same solve path, but I started by looking for cages that needed all their cells to make their totals. Later, I had a scare with the largest 6 cage. Just before that, I had narrowed down the cells on an arrow, reminding myself there could be repeated digits. Then I switched to look at the 3 cells on the 6 cage to see if I could narrow it further than a 123 triple. Then I thought, wait, I didn't account for the possibility of repeats! Spent a moment thinking that I might have to redo the solve, before remembering the rule for cages and that repeats weren't allowed, so I was good.
I didn't know the trick, but it still only took me 60 min - and placing the boxes was easier because I didn't doubt the rules the way Simon did. After so many recent hard puzzles, it was a much needed boost to solve an easier one. Many thanks to James Sinclair and CTC for this diversion.
I had to watch this video late due to some busy times this week, but I came back to it with great anticipation because I felt that I could probably solve the puzzle! Thanks to your tips and tricks at the beginning, Simon, and thanks to other deconstruction puzzles I have watched you or Mark solve, I could make my way through this mostly on my own - thank you for all of the great education over the time I have been watching! (I was sure you were going to say that all of the gray cells were 'quorate' but you never did - so I filled it in for you in my own mind, one of the words you taught me!)
The error that caused the solve to go wrong around the 30 minute mark involved misscanning the 1 in box 3 as being in the 28 cage and therefore removing 1 from the pencil marked options in box 2...
My brain decided to interpret "misscanning" as "miss-canning" (i.e. [mis-] + [canning]) in spite of English, and I just spent a minute trying to figure out what cans had to do with what Simon did.
64:51 Got the 3x3 regions pretty easily but had to rewind the Sudoku a couple of times due to some sort mistakes. Pretty approachable. Thanks James for a very enjoyable puzzle.
Love a region building puzzle! This flowed incredibly well, I love that 6 cage but also special shout out to the 8 cage in R4C3 and R5C3. I put a 7 in the wrong spot at the start and had to go all the way back from the end and redo from there, but 23m48s very happy with that.
Amazing puzzle. It flowed so well. I am so impressed with the people who can do that. I have contemplated setting a puzzle but getting logic to flow like this is so daunting to me. Got a 21:13. Also, Simon. the fact that you can call that cryptic crossword solve a fail, you have to give yourself a little bit of credit. I never noticed the misspelling, because frankly, I am pleased when I get a single answer on my own without you walking me through the logic, and I've been watching for ages.
Finished in 21:58. Fun constraint. Pretty straightforward once you figure out where each 3x3 box is. But then again, I've been doing killer sudokus since the first year of the pandemic.
36:32 normally I'm rubbish at these deconstruction puzzles, but this one was quite approachable and very fun. About half the time was spent finding the regions and the other half filling them in. Beautiful puzzle.
I've actually completed most of the first 6 boxes before continuing to top right of the board. Also I'm probably not the only person to state this but I'm happy not being as smart as Simon. No need to overthink everything, just flowing through the puzzle smoothly. But of course I do understand that it's all natural for him. Beautiful and very enjoyable solve! My second deconstruction puzzle solve, first being Fog Deconstructed by (no surprise) James Sinclair as well. However this one's definitely easier, this one took me just a little over 2h while the other one 6h+ over 4 day period. Cheers!
Aside from needing to frantically check different points of the video to see where I went wrong and discovering I had placed a 345 triple into a row that had a 4 in it, this puzzle went very smoothly. Great logic, fun solve, still managed to get it in 43 minutes despite about 10 minutes of being on the wrong path, very fun way to spend the hour.
@@DarklordZagarna Why would you think you could exclude a cage entirety, though? The rules are very clear. "Cages show the sum of their digits". Not much ambiguity there.
@@RichSmith77 Responding to multiple people saying "this is unclear" by saying "no, you're wrong, it's clear" is both annoying and also futile. Something that a nontrivial number of people don't understand is by definition unclear, regardless of whether you personally think that it's easy to understand.
18:35 for me (conflict checker off), this was a really fun puzzle and flowed really well! My time would have been a bit faster, but like Simon I repeated a digit in one of the boxes near the end and had to backtrack a bit to fix it. 😅 Props to James for a great puzzle!
Well now I've had my puzzle fix. And this one gave us some real kicks. Though the puzzle was swell It was also like Hell For it starts with the river of Syx.
I clicked "like" on this limerick -- and then realized that I'd mis-read the last word (I teach classics -- that river is very-familiar). Even cleverer the way you actually wrote it! 😺
00:33:05 - 9% faster! A unicorn! Normally I'm 100-200% slower but this puzzle went way smoother than I expected it to. I immediately jumped on the 6 cage and identified the 5 regions making an L shape in the bottom left corner as the only way the puzzle could be possible, which saved me substantial tine over Simon having to stop and explain to everyone the 9 cells that must be within a region before working his way into it. I didn't even start looking in the top right until I'd sudoku'd out the bottom left, then I looked at the top right and took the 3 cells that had to be in a region, then knowing my 6 cage was solved worked out the three 2x2 boxes that must be in regions, then I was able to place the region in the top right corner because I realized that to try and place it anywhere else would create a situation where I had 8 cells to make 28 and that isn't possible. Then I realized those cages had to reach their sums so I placed the other two regions in the only places that could include the 15 and 16 cages at the now middle fringe created along the 6 cage. Then it was just sudoku to freedom.
25:55, which is probably the fastest I’ve ever solved relative to the video length. Very enjoyable puzzle! Some of Simon’s delay was not trusting the rules as written. I immediately jumped on the border cages, which I knew had to contain real cells. I forgot to use the row/column 3/6/9 rule, which slowed me down a bit.
The way that I worked out the locations of the boxes was a little different. I saw that the most boxes you could put above the 6 cage was three, so there needed to be six boxes below the 6 cage in order to make nine total, and there's only one way to place those six boxes.
9:33 - I think there's a slightly better variant of this explanation. You start by establishing that any 3x3 box in the grid will overlap exactly one of the green cells. You then go on to say for the sake of argument that you pick a green cell to contain, and show that the next 3x3 box must contain one of the remaining eight green cells, and state that this continues until all green cells are contained. I think this last step can be replaced. Any 3x3 box contains exactly one green cell. 3x3 boxes do not overlap, so each 3x3 box contains a different green cell. There are nine green cells, and nine boxes. It follows that every green cell will be contained by a box. (it follows because the nine boxes will contain a total of exactly nine green cells, there exist exactly nine green cells, and there's only one way to choose a set of 9 objects out of a set of 9 objects).
50:25 Which is quite quick for me. I always have to do a bunch of mental math for killer sudoku. It is not difficult it is just a bit slow for me. Someday I will have to sit down and memorize the more common 3 and four cell combos and all the various triangle numbers forwards and backwards. I think that would help me a lot on these type puzzles. This puzzle would have been much easier had I known off the top of my head that the triangle number for 7 was 28. I looked at those 2 numbers noticed that 28 divided by 7 was 4, a middle-y number, and figured there were a bunch of options, nope 1-7.
46:21, a most respectable time for me. Still having a bit of trouble with noticing required sums, though - I needed the prompt from Simon to notice that once the 16 cages were incorporated, they were by necessity also solved.
I'm thinking a puzzle maker needs to come up with a 12 X 12 deconstructed puzzle and name it "Just to screw with Simon's trick" 🙃 Took me ages to do this one but I got there with no video help.
Very nice flow, I liked it! Was easier than it seemed at first, and I didn't start with the 6 cage. Instead... ... ... spoilers below ... ... I started with the 15 cage on the bottom left. Then it just flowed... on the easy side I'd say, but nothing too obvious, nice setup! and I was wondering why Simon wasn't catching up with me (as I played the video along). He just forgot to finish the 6 cage as early as possible ;) ...
My time for this puzzle was 16:45, solver number 6675. Definitely one of the easier 11x11 construction puzzles I've done, which I think is attributable to a setter who is careful about dropping clues in just the right places to lead you through if you can spot them.
For me, 39:38, with a rather haphazard application of the "digits don't repeat in cages" part of the rules, and with being a bit confused at the start how so many cages crammed into a particular corner of the grid.
91:11, I didn't know the trick, but didn't find it terribly difficult without it. I did assume all cages had to be filled, and used that fact to make my boxes.
Finished in 36:23. Finding the boxes was surprisingly quick, but I ended the puzzle with two 2s in box 5, which messed things up a little. Took a few minutes to find that, but the fix was (luckily) quite simple
I managed to get the regions sorted very quickly. Then for some reason put 9/8 in the 16 cages. When I restarted and realised this it went a LOT easier (of course)
