Hello, and welcome to Puzzles for Progress! I hope you're all enjoying your summer.
Today for you I've made three puzzles with two-word names: one original, one non-original, and one variant that isn't really original but that I named. I don't wanna overhype it, but I think it's one of my favorite editions of Puzzles for Progress in recent memory. It's also perhaps the one with the most colorful answer key (since I like to use brown and yellow for shaded and unshaded in Chocolate Banana).
But before I get to today's puzzles, I'd like to thank all of you who have, in the last two months, asked me how my second book is coming along. The answer is it hasn't! Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. I'm still planning to make a second book at some point, I just haven't been prioritizing it...
Today's edition of Puzzles fordle Progress, my custom wordle, is an especially evil (but fair!) seven-letter word: solve
Since Building Blocks is one of my most popular puzzles, I've been interested in making another word puzzle without clues, perhaps another with a "chunk bank". Sextet Cycles, an invention of mine with concentric colored cycles, fits that bill! It was surprisingly restricted to create, but testing has indicated it's on the gentler side to solve. By the way, when I recently visited Nassau County (New York) as well as Nassau Hall (Princeton), I noticed that swapping the halves of NASSAU produces the word SAUNAS, an observation very much in the spirit of this puzzle.
Next up is a logic puzzle type that's I've been really enjoying lately, Chocolate Banana. This one should be a bit harder than my previous such puzzles, but only a bit! The top left is designed to show off a particular deduction I think is cool.
And last is a Norinori variant where the unshaded cells have to be connected. I've done exactly one of these, by djmathman, and it went by the name "Norinori (Variant)," while Eric Fox's tinyurl.com/puzzlerules document calls it "Norinori (Connectivity)". I felt this gave me license to give it a random name, which I've done. inspired by the fact that "nori" backwards is "iron". Enjoy Iron Norinori:
(If you find any errors, it’s possible that I’ve fixed them on puzzlesforprogress.net. If I haven't, please tell me about them!)
