Puzzle Description:

Making a big entrance. Hopefully...

#1: Kristen Vognild (kristen) on Nov 16, 2020

Welcome!

Wow! At first, I thought it would be a bust of Shakespeare or Beethoven or somesuch, on a pedestal in front of a fancy window. Then the suggestion changed a bit...
Very good! Quite difficult!

That is a tough puzzle.
Cute image, though

Wow! That was a very tough puzzle. Had to guess 3 times. The image is a bit odd, but understandable. Lots of happy vibes.

After the initial line logic (and quite frankly, I'm not sure if I got all of it), I looked at R18C15-16. There is not a way to make both of those cells black without making R18 invalid. So one or both of them must be dots. In either case, R5C16 will always be black. LL.

Next I looked at C36 and C40. Only a 1 clue is left to be placed in C36. Only three 1 clues are left to be placed in C40. Now look at rows 23, 26, 36, and 46. In each one of these rows, the 4 or 9 clues need to be completed. So they will have to get into C36 or C40. But remember that C36 and C40 only have 4 total black cells that can be filled in. This tells us that all of the other cells in C36 and C40 are dots except for rows 23, 26, 36, and 46. LL.

EL on R55 makes R55C22 and R55C26 dots. LL.

We can do a similar thing with C5 and C9 that we did with C36 and C40. In this case, we would look at rows 23, 26, 33, and 36. We still need 4 black cells filled, and these rows have to fill those in. So the rest of C5 and C9 are dots except for those rows. LL.

I'm going to stop there for now.

I enjoyed this puzzle even though I had to guess a bit. Thanks

Love the image!

After Gator's hint:

C12: Either R50-55 are all white or there is a 4-1 placed in those rows. The 4-1 would make C13 invalid, so R50-55 C12 are all white.

C22-26: The bottom clues in these columns can't all go into R44, so at least one of them must go into R49. R49 C14-C17 and C31-32 are white. LL.

R55: No matter how the first 4 is finished, R54C20 is black. No matter how the second 4 is finished, R54 C28-29 are black. LL.

There's some tricky LL in R50 that's available here, and it might have been available before my previous step. It completely places the 5 into C22-26.

C31: If the bottom 2 is placed in R51-52, it makes R51 invalid, so it must go into R54-55 instead. LL.

C25: Whether the 8 goes into R44 or R52, R43C27 is black. Minimal LL.

C43-45: C43-44 each have two 1s remaining and C45 has three. The only place the extra 1 in C45 can go that will not also add black to C43-44 is in R46. Minimal LL.

C42-45: Each of these columns now has two 1s remaining. R26 and R36 have 9s available, and all other open rows have 3s. If a black in C45 is placed in a row with a 3, C43-44 will be black and C42 will be white in that row. Any row except R26 and R36 that is white in C43-45 will also be white in C41-42. This means that no matter how C45 is placed, C42 will have R26 and R36 black. LL.

Currently at 85%, need to break here for now.

Goto next topic

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