For today’s Puzzle Time, I pull Tessera from my ever-growing graveyard of incomplete games. It’s one I started making some time back, when I was learning Cocos2d-x, but as is often the case I never got round to finishing it. Regrets aside, I think it makes a perfect blog entry!

  1. Each cell can be coloured either red or blue
  2. A region is a group of orthogonally connected cells of the same colour (diagonals don’t connect cells)
  3. If a cell contains a number, the region containing the cell must be of that size

Image

It can be played here.

I think this is quite an elegant puzzle. If we assume the top-left cell is, say, blue, then the grid has exactly one solution. Little numbers are quite easy to fill in, but for large numbers it becomes a bit tougher.

I am unsure what possible deductions could be made about this puzzle yet, but I am interested to see how few numbers you can get away with putting on the grid. From my limited tinkerings, if you put large numbers in one area of the map, there are usually multiple solutions…

As always, good luck!