44: quadz

themeless midi 14. enjoy!

construction notes (warning: spoilers)

i made this puzzle as a break from another midi i've been working on, where i'm using my usual two-triple-stacks layout but also trying to make it a pangram. i have what seems like a promising top stack, but i can't make the bottom half work. i've been banging my head against the wall over it for days---i think i'm just gonna give up on it for now.

anyway, i decided to try another challenge that i've wanted to do for a while now: quad stacks.

with double quad stacks in an 11x11 midi, your black square arrangement options are pretty limited, since they all have to be crammed into the middle three rows. assuming you don't want any vertical spanners running between the top and bottom (which would make an already hard construction even harder), you're kind of forced into a layout with two barely-connected halves. that's not great for solving flow, but it makes it easier to construct, since you can fill each half almost independently.

after picking a black square layout, i started out trying to fill the top half. i blocked out the bottom 4 rows of the puzzle and let Crossfire run for a really long time. it turned up a lot more possibilities than i expected, which was exciting. i went with the first one i found that seemed decent, which also had the cool bonus of including two Q's. in retrospect, i wish i checked the rest of the possibilities to make sure i wasn't ignoring anything amazing, but oh well.

then i let Crossfire do its thing again on the bottom half. this time there were a lot fewer options, but luckily there was one that i liked. wasn't crazy about ANODAL (it seems to be a less frequently used variant of ANODIC), but i was willing to settle for it.

all in all, happy with my first foray into quad stacks. there weren't any particularly snazzy entries, but that's maybe to be expected given the difficulty of the construction.

hope you had fun solving!