Unique Clues Tapa

Welp. I was going to call this one Mystery Tapa but then I saw GMPuzzles’ Sunday Surprise posted yesterday. What a coincidence. I started making this one last Thursday, before knowing anything about any upcoming Sunday Surprises anywhere.

Mystery Tapa 1

Rules:

  • Regular Tapa rules apply.
  • Question marks represent nonzero integers.
  • Asterisks are wildcards: they represent a nonzero amount of question marks.
  • No clue may appear multiple times, hence the name.

Gah, this puzzle took a lot of wrangling to make it work. I gave up on having a symmetric clue pattern.

Clouds

I think this might be my first entirely vanilla puzzle.  About time I made one instead of all the variants and hybrids.

Clouds 1

It’s a Clouds aka Rain Clouds aka Radar puzzle. Oddly enough, I didn’t find any satisfactory sites explaining the rules.

Rules:

  • Shade some cells to form rectangular clouds. The clouds don’t touch each other, even by corners.
  • The numbers tell the amount of shaded cells in that row/column.
  • A cloud must be at least two cells tall and wide: no 1×n or n×1 clouds allowed.

I find Clouds puzzles to be pretty hard, so I’m going to call this one pretty hard. Plus or minus a few arbitrary units of difficulty. *shrugs*

Easy As Skyscrapers

This puzzle is probably on its 20th layout iteration, but I’m finally happy with the it. In the end I used less repeating adjacent clues than I intended, but at least I managed to get symmetrical clue placement.

Easy As Skyscrapers v3

Rules:

  • Each clue is either a Skyscrapers clue, telling the number of skyscrapers it sees
  • or an Easy As ABC clue, telling the first number it sees
  • but not both.