Serpentomino Puzzles for Christmas
There’s a snake in my inbox!
Bulgarian puzzle constructor Galen Ivanov sent me two collections of interesting new puzzles, Serpentominos, of his own design, which I’m passing on to you, as a Krazydad Christmas present. These puzzles share some characteristics with Pentominos, Dominos and similar mathematical recreations, and are quite different from the Sudoku and Slitherlink variant puzzles you may be used to.
As the illustration shows, you fill the grid with line segments, completely filling the grid with 13 “serpents” – each of which occupies 6 squares, and begins and ends on one of the provided dots. Serpents may not cross or touch each other. No two serpents may have the same shape (including rotations and reflections), and due to the constraints of snake skeletal anatomy, no serpent’s shape may include a sharp “u turn” — you can’t make two rights in a row, or two lefts in a row.
Please reread the preceding paragraph carefully, because all the rules are absolutely necessary to solve these puzzles, otherwise you will find them impossibly maddening (as I did, before I understood the sharp u-turn rule).
Galen has provided two sets of these puzzles, small-sized puzzles, as shown here, in which you fill a grid with 13 six-block serpents, and medium-sized puzzles, in which you fill a larger grid with 30 seven-block serpents.
If you get completely stuck, send me a snapshot, and I’ll try to help you make some headway.
113 Small Serpentonimo Puzzles
60 Medium Serpentonimo Puzzles
Enjoy!