Puzzle Description:

This is a floral pattern type of design that my eldest daughter likes to draw.

#1: Gator (gator) on Jun 24, 2011 [HINT]

This is not a puzzle to be undertaken lightly, and it will require a fair amount of time to solve if you do not guess or use advanced techniques. I set an initial difficulty at 4 as a warning (and LLS in the title). I'll remove the 4 rating once enough difficulty ratings are given.

I'll post a guide when I get some time this weekend.

Thanks for the suggestion on giving a starting difficulty rating Joe.

Beautiful pattern.

great ll solve
yes i had to hunt around a while for a few "hidden" dots that helped me continue
time consuming? yes
difficult? not quite

Thanks aldege and bugaboo.

hard but a lovely design :-)

Frankly, I'm not sure if all of these steps are required (they probably are not), but these are the steps I took to solve this puzzle.

"Purple logic" ('L' key) will get all the edges and a little more of the right side.

Next make sure you have marked the more obvious dots at R6C19, R25C12, R12C6, R14C10, and R16C10. These let us do some more purple logic.

Next make sure you get the dot at R10C14.

Looking at row 24, R24C16 has to be one of the 1 clues. So R24C15 and R24C17 are dots.

A little more purple logic, then make sure to get the dots at R26C14 and R26C16. More purple logic, then make sure to get the dots at R5C15 and R5C17.

Now let's do some unconventional line logic. Look at row 10. We have the 1 2 1 clues let to determine. R10C13 can either be the left 1 clue or part of the 2 clue. If it is the left 1 clue, then the rest of row 10 to the left would be dots. If it is part of the 2 clue, then R10C12 would be black and R10C11 would be a dot. So with either possibility, R10C11 is a dot. We can then apply the same logic with R10C15 to see that R10C17 will be a dot. We can now get some more dots.

Next look at column 12. R14C12-R15C12 has to be either part of the upper 3 clue or the 2 clue. If it is the 2 clue, then R16C12 would be a dot of course. If we assume it is the upper 3 clue, then in order to fit the 2 1 3 clues, R16C12 also has to be dot. We can also see in this row where R12C12 would have to be a dot. A little more purple logic.

Next let's look at some possibilities on column 6. If R20C6 is either the 1 clue or part of the 2 clue, then R18C6 has to be a dot. The same logic can be done on row 6 to see that R6C14 has to be a dot.

Looking at column 19, if one would try to make R15C19 black, then it would complete a 3 clue. But this would make column 19 invalid as the rest of the clues in that column would then not fit properly. So R15C19 has to be a dot. More purple logic, then make sure to get the dots at R15C5 and R17C5. The rest will solve with normal line logic.

Thanks Linda.

Wow - this is beautiful!

It took awhile to find all the hidden clues, but once I found them, it solved nicely.

Very worth the effort.

This is lovely! I made a few educated guesses, because I can't use L with this browser, and they were all correct. :)

Thanks Teresa and Kristen.

i had attempted this puzzle SEVERAL times only to hit red dots and waste time trying to back-track...it's been in my saved puzzles for a while. wonderful solve!

Thanks David!

Loved the solve, nice pattern!

Thanks!

Thank you so much, Gator, for the Hints. I couldn't have solved without them, and it was a fun puzzle to finish. And the hints were good jedi mind training for future puzzles. ;)

This was difficult. There were so many cases of advanced hintery needed that I basically gave up and just utilized a couple of them from Gator's comments. I found myself clicking the Hint button as well - just to make sure I hadn't missed something obvious.

I think this is probably one of the hardest (if not hardest) LLS puzzles I have created. I have solved this puzzle twice (not counting the many iterations required for the creation), and it takes me the better part of an hour to solve it.

really hard. just one guessing at the end.

I must have started right, because it was challenging but not overly hard. Nice detail. No guessing.

I aree with lack cat not really ard but fun to solve

Goto next topic

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