Broken Sign Blog
#171: Diamond Chain
27 October 2025Diamond Chain is a new genre I came up with about half a year ago as an instructionless puzzle for the GAPP series. It is now available on pzprxs.
The example puzzle below is the one we also used in the instructionless context, so feel free to try and deduce the rules from that, instead of reading them below.
I don’t have a ton to say about the genre itself. We needed an object placement ruleset and I was looking at the various inputs Penpa supports for answer check and wanted to do something novel with them. I landed on the half-triangles which are normally used for Shakashaka and thought there might be something interesting one can do with placing diamonds.
As a side note, I have tried reusing this structure as a Bramble variant (replacing the dominoes with diamonds). The first attempt looked promising, so I’ll be exploring that eventually.
Rules: Place diamonds on some gridpoints such that the given shaded cells and the diamonds combined form a single connected structure. Diamonds cannot share an edge. Number clues indicate how many diamonds touch their cell.
