Thomas Snyder (aka Dr. Sudoku) is a two-time World Sudoku Champion and five-time US Puzzle Champion, as well as the author of several books of puzzles. His puzzles are hand-crafted, with artistic themes, serving as a kind of “cure for the common sudoku.” Each week he posts a new puzzle on his blog, The Art of Puzzles. This week’s prescription deals with a variation of Battleships puzzles where numbered ships may lead to rougher seas.
Battleships were my favorite puzzle when I was young and I certainly remember turning straight to the page with them in each issue of GAMES. I bet you could find a dozen issues in my childhood room where that was basically the only page I had touched.
As a puzzle constructor, I've experimented with Battleship puzzles in several ways, but primarily by adding numbers onto the fleet which was an entryway into Battleship Sudoku, my first book of puzzles. Borrowing that same trick leads to a more mathematical version of Battleships itself (which I greatly prefer to the "Digital Battleships" version sometimes seen at the WPC), and I've made two such puzzles for this week.
Rules: Locate the indicated 6- or 10-ship fleet in the grid. Each segment of a ship occupies a single cell. Ships are oriented either horizontally or vertically, and do not touch each other, not even diagonally. Some ship segments, or sea cells without any ship segments, are given in the grid. The segments of each ship are labeled with digits as shown in the fleet diagram, and the numbers on the right and bottom edges of the grid reveal the sum of all the digits that appear in that row or column. Ships can be rotated before entry into the grid (for example, a ship with labeled segments 123 could be entered as either 123 or 321 in left-to-right or top-to-bottom order).
Example:
Puzzles:
