Puzzle Description:

baby, and head out! (someone had to do it)

#1: CB Paul (cbpaul) on May 26, 2021

er, do I wanna know what this is?

That was one of the three that I tried and failed to draw in a presentable way. Good job!

Can someone give me a good hint on this one? I've done all the blue and, through some edge logic, a bit of the black, but I seem to be hopelessly bogged down. I can't seem to find any place to take hold of this one.

R6-C2 is black. Climb along from there.

Thanks, Paul...that worked like a charm!

CB, it's exactly as described ^_^

Don't see anything that fits the story.

This was a tough one!

For a quick clue, place the 4 in row 2 at C8-C11.

For something approaching a fully logical solution, here are my notes:

Edge logic got me a lot of row 2. C1-7, 11-12, 20. Then I noticed R3C11 must be black, as otherwise there was a contradiction down the line.

R3 has dots from C1 to C5, then C8 isn't a dot. C14 is a dot.

R11C6 is a dot. So is R10C6 and R10C7. R8C3 as well. And R7C3. That eliminates enough on C3 so C5R3 is black. C5R5 is a dot. C7R5 is a dot. C7R4 is a dot. C8R4 is a dot.

From there I reached a contradiction after filling in the two dots at R2 C16/17, where whether the 2 in column 4 fit in R9/10 gave an error, things broke.

That put row 2 at columns 8-11. Then it was downhill.

But I think there has to be a better way than what I got. Anyone want to improve on what I have?

BlackCat - It's a mom giving birth. She is lying on her back with her head off-screen to our left. The blue at the bottom is the railing of a hospital bed. The blue on the left is a surgical drape. Across the top is the mom's leg, sideways and up in the air. Below it is a baby's head that she is pushing out.

EL R2 marks C2, C7, and C12 white. I don't see a way to mark the other columns Andrew mentioned, at least not on the first pass with simple edge logic.

I can use deep lookahead to mark R2 C3-6 white; placing the 4 there would make C11 invalid in about 4 steps.

From here I'm struggling to follow the logic in the rest of Andrew's hint. I can see that R3-4 in C11 can't both be white, but don't have enough info yet to pin down one or the other. In R3 I can eliminate some individual positions for the 3s but not enough to mark anything white (for example, there can't be one in C4-6 or C5-7, but I can't rule out C2-4 or C3-5 yet).

Hmm, I re-solved it, to test for difficulty. I used a combination of edge logic and 2-way logic to start the upper black line. That allowed me to place the 4 in R2 between C8 and C11, flanked by descending 3s on either side.

I recreated the puzzle in a new window, and the solver said it had a unique solution, but I should try solving it manually.

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