Ok. I'm at work now so I'll check the linked site later.

Oh wait - does "jigsaw" count as a grid deduction genre?

Jigsaw Sudoku maybe

No, I don't think so.

Have you done these types of puzzles before, Mike? It might be a good idea to do some to get an idea of what we mean

(not "hybrids", just the regular ones)

I attempted the recent steganography one (but it was very easy)

That's one of your puzzles.

Oh, I see - "Have you done" as in "Have you solved"

Yes.

Casually, I suppose? Like nonograms, and the ones where you fill in a grid by drawing paths between pairs of colored nodes.

Yeah, I'm not sure if those are particularly good examples of the genre.

And I know about other types (kuromasu, nurikabe) but I'm not so good at them

Wanna try a LITS I made a while back? It shouldn't be too difficult.

(I posted it in here a while ago, but I don't believe you were here for that.)

Huh? I thought the above posted one was yours

LITS is another genre of grid-deduction puzzles.

The above posted one?

The riddle that Sphinx just linked to

Oh, you thought that was what I had linked to to see if you wanted to try it out.

Here's the puzzle.

The rules: Shade four adjacent squares in each section to make a tetromino. All shaded squares must be connected, no 2x2 blocks can be fully shaded, and touching tetrominoes must be different. (That last one includes rotations and reflections - a J shape cannot touch an L shape, for instance.)

@thecoder16 #1332 but I haven't played Hearthstone in a while... I mostly use it for Overwatch

@Deusovi I see a T P I S - TIPS? Did I solve it?

Yeah, the regions are shaped like TSPI, my puzzle hunt team :P

So because the one in the center-right is a 1x4, does that mean the one in the bottom-right can't be 4x1, because that would force touching similar shapes?

Clever girl

That's right!

And there's only 1 solution?

Yes, and it can be found purely with logic (no guessing).

I may have misunderstood the rules

That breaks two rules.

One: There can be no 2x2 shaded squares. (This applies even across borders!)

Oh! I did not think of that. okay.

Two: All shaded squares must be in one orthogonally connected group.

(You have three "islands".)

(On mobile, sorry if I didn't explain those clearly!)

Can the total shape have loops/holes?

Sure.

Yep, that's it!

So for the FTC, you might make, say, a LITS puzzle with big regions, but certain rows and columns have nonogram clues.

Or a LITS + sudoku, where the tetrominos have some property about the numbers they contain

Yeah!

You could even double up, making the LITS regions the same as the Sudoku regions.

("Shaded cells contain only prime numbers", maybe?)

But there's a snag here - Some hybrids could make both component puzzles easier to solve, right?

Adding nonogram info to a LITS would be providing extra info

Exactly, so you limit the number of clues drastically, and let the different kinds of clues interact in interesting ways

Yup - if all you did was add clues to an already-solvable puzzle, then it'd just make it easier.

But if you can make them interact somehow, it can be really interesting.

Like, say you had some arrangement like this.

And a nonogram clue gave you a 3 at the end of that middle row.

You would know that the top-left full square is filled, so you could extend that way, and you could also shade in the top left of the rectangle.

Then you could rule out the top right of the rectangle and shade in the bottom middle and bottom right of it. That tells you that the two squares under the ones you just shaded aren't both shaded...

and if that row ends in a 2, then you'd know it has to be the left one!

I might not have explained that well, but you can do a lot of interesting things with these types of interactions that you could never do with an ordinary puzzle of either type.

Uh..... okay.