itch.io

Ah true. I think he meant the smallest absolute value.

(Note: The solution is not 49-stone. I might remove that later as it is sort of a red-herring.)

Very good points. I probably need to give the later boards more interesting shapes in order to weaken stone-spamming strategies (both yours and the opponent's) while improving strategies like fire and ice.

Regarding the uselessness of large stones like 83: The intent was that most players will not figure out the 77 combo, but will get -1 stone, so they might use -83 in their deck. And 89 is intentionally hard to use because they can potentially lead to very boring games.

Glad you enjoyed the 0 puzzle!

Second post by Forever angel, which also got caught in the spam filter:

I became really frustrated after some point(and even more frustrated when itch io didn't save my post). While first levels feel like they are about outsmarting opponent and finding a unique approach based on some idea for everyone, last prime masters feel like just ridiculously overpowered gem-generating machines with no-matter-how-many-cause-it-almost-infinite-energy that you can only cheese with some very specific decks. 

My approach for 71 and 79 was "23, 43, 77 and many 59-s", that was not any fun, I beat one level immediately after another first try without changing my deck, what's the point? And while later it stopped working, it was only cause almost everything stopped working and I wanted to drop game cause of 83 and 89. Especially 89, it just stresses you out and then when you beat it goes like "haha, this gem is useless for you cause you have only 85 energy and need of 43-s makes this deck almost useless against thing that just spam about 20 gems on board in first 3 turns". I beat 83 and 89 with some recombinations of only 67-s and 1-s, it was not fun at all,  there are many cool and interesting gems but it felt like I was getting punished for trying to use anything interesting. Almost all gems from second half don't give a **** about what is on the board they interact with your decks and cards, board-control and right placing gems becomes meaningless, all effects of early-game gems are countered by 23-s, things from lab are cool but they are usually used as "yet another 7 cause I have only 3 of them in my library" or something like this(and for getting 73 and 0, that was fun to figure out). I understand that my problems can be nothing near objective, but I just really liked this game but also became frustrated with it and if this can be somehow fixed I would be really happy.

P.S. Any hints for 97 would be highly appreciated :)

Thanks for the feedback, Forever Angel! Sorry I didn't check the spam filter for 7 months, itch doesn't notify me about it.

Ah, that is indeed the question. The lab holds the tools and the clues.

Finally got 303! Just took a couple more tries.

Oh man, defeating the 11 guy was such a cool surprise. Great mechanics all around -- the 100s were a good choice. High score: 302

Not a typo, but it is unfortunately ambiguous -- you just have to choose a different A.

(small spoiler) Unlike the other letters, W  is slightly nonstandard, potentially requiring some knowledge of <rot13> pbzchgre fpvrapr </rot13>. 

(I haven't solved the final challenge yet, even though I thought I understood every letter.)

Nevermind, I solved W. Wow!

Really fun so far! I think I've got everything except W and maybe B. Is there possibly a mistake or inconsistency with W? I found a way to get [3]50 = 40-30, which feels close. (And [0.7419]50 = 40-30, which is arguably true, lol.)

Thanks! 

Yes, the L is always hidden. In case you missed it (though it sounds like you didn't), you can logically deduce it by using the L10 clue. You can also deduce it in puzzle 12 with no ambiguity (if you know "_acking any"). Early versions of the book had another hidden leftover in puzzle 5, but I removed it when remaking that puzzle. If I do another update, I might foreshadow the mechanic early on using a partially-covered leftover letter.

Here's the solution for weak tree(3) that helped me find a similar solution in my game: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3837501/before-the-current-lower-bound-... (Oh, and I should also credit my younger brother, who told me about this problem in the first place. He was already familiar with this solution, which helped me test the game initially.)

Sorry for the delay, it's fixed now. (A couple days ago, actually.)

Yep! I tested it right before uploading. I expect that Ultra is very difficult now, but I didn't find it too difficult when using the classic tree(3) solution as a starting point.

True, but I believe that this is equivalent to weak tree(3) -- just ignore the trunks! (However, there may be some slight differences between the two once I use the proper inf-embedding algorithm [for determining uniqueness].)

[edit: To clarify, the trunk on the big tree and the subtree essentially cancel out, because every non-trunk branch has a parent branch. So if we removed trunks from all the trees, nothing would change.]

Nope, Bobogram was way after (and it didn't consciously influence any updates). I was inspired by ABDEC's predecessor LOK -- which just came out on Steam today! Big fan of ABDEC as well,  though I regretfully looked up answers on two puzzles.

(First prototype of 12 Word Searches = Dec 2022,      Abdec releases and I play it = March 2023,      12 Word Searches v1.0 = Oct 2023,    I play Bobogram = June 2024)

Nice! Laminated seems like a great option, to make erasing a non-issue (like Letibus puzzlebooks). Not sure how well it'll work for a classroom, but I'm curious to find out!

It was my mistake. Currently, the trivia question's actual answer is infinite, of course.

The infinite algorithm was unintended, resulting from the difference in uniqueness rules between this game and the Weak Tree Function. I'm hoping to patch it out later today.   [edit: Finally fixed it, about a week later.]

It's intentional, the goal was to make that part easy (no wrong answer) since one D is mostly covered. Though I can see how it could be unwanted. (Puzzle 2 has a similar ambiguity with RA___ that I tried to avoid but can't.)

Great! Looks like I didn't have to worry about vertical margins.

Thank you! Very interesting playthrough, glad it was archived. I've never seen somebody find an alternative for Notary and try to fix puzzle 2 like that. (Also, I had no idea about "Linegames"!)

Ah, that explains it. It's actually n15 not m15, and there's slightly more to the leftovers. You can logically deduce n15 from the hints above. Note: Unlike all the other words, n15 is, technically, (rot13) tvoorevfu.

Ah, yes, lots of folks have had trouble there.

Hint 0: There's no need for guesswork, this one's a logic puzzle.

Hint 1:  Remember the <rot13> pngrtbel bs chmmyr 12. </rot13>

Hint 2: Make sure you understand the <rot13> uvagf ng gur obggbz pbearef </rot13>.

Hint 3: <rot 13> Gurer ner 2 "jbeqf" yrsg... </rot13>

Big Hint: <rot12> ...ngf ftqk mdq ftq emyq. </rot12>

Here you go: https://1drv.ms/b/s!Aoe420c78Dheo6oFVidYXlIhIATWfw?e=M7A06M

I will upload it to itch in a day or two (inside other_versions.zip), alongside update v1.23.

...on second thought, I will just go ahead and scale it up.

(I can't just simply cut the landscape pages in half, since landscape isn't 17x11 ratio and the page "halves" are uneven. I have to either make things smaller, or make the scaling a bit uneven.)

Sure! Do you want it to be scaled-up a bit, to fit the taller paper extra width of the double-page? Here's a comparison between the current size and scaled-up: https://imgur.com/a/Yn5hgZs.

Are these margins large enough?

(Note that the right-hand side has to be fairly small, to fit long words and glyphs. That's why landscape uses uneven splits, and the default printable version is vertical.)

Wow, good catch! That was totally unintentional, but it seems to have been that way since before v1.0. I'll fix it in the next update.

Full playthrough on Twitch by DwarfWoot: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2283581637 (length: ~7 hours)

Ah, neat, so it's basically just "you may move any straight line of bees".

I'm a bit confused about moving a line of bees. It says:

"Similarly, if a Bee moves and there are other Bees in a line extending from it, every Bee along the axis that line forms may move together with the initial Bee. There may not be gaps in the line or queue."

Suppose I have a row with 4 bees: [B B B - B].

1) Can I move the 3 adjacent bees? (even though there's a fourth bee on that axis)

2 Can I move just 2 adjacent Bees? (even though there's a third bee next to them)

Ah, solving that might require the use of Wikipedia, if you're not already familiar with it. (But, it's nothing too complicated.)

Hint for jigsaw crossword: Abg rirel jbeq vf havdhr, ohg bar bs gurz pregnvayl vf.

I've finally created a Ko-Fi page. No pressure to donate.  https://ko-fi.com/playcebo

P.S. Unrelatedly, I'd like to recommend a free puzzle book called Bobogram, filled with some challenging but very fun rule-discovery grid puzzles: https://uiqoo.kr/bobogram/ (I learned about it via the Thinky Puzzle Game community.)

Fixed. Thanks

Thanks so much for all the bug-finding! Fixed. 

(nerdy details: When improving 194, I added code to abort the tile-burning process early upon failure [i.e. tilesBurned == 0], but it turns out I never coded the AI to increment tilesBurned as it burns tiles. So it burned 1 tile and then said "welp, I burned 0 tiles, so I guess I'll give up now".)

Sorry about that! Fixed now. Turns out it was an order-of-operations issue!

if(  stoneNumber % DRAIN_FACTOR * DRAIN_FACTOR == 0   )
      { drainMultiplier = 2 }

Thanks! It's fixed now (apart from a visual bug with M-stone).

Sorry about that! The save files are stored using "Unity PlayerPrefs". I do not know what causes those to be deleted. Perhaps running a cleanup program?