Knossos Games - Circumnavigational

If you haven’t read the Drawing Board comments for the first Circumnavigational puzzle, go back and read those before proceeding below. This puzzle was pretty much set until I discovered that looping can bring up unintended solutions, and in this case, a very easy solution after the loop.

For the second puzzle of the series, I wanted to explore having long lines of green and orange hexagons. You wouldn’t be able to pass between hexagons of the same color, so you’d have to run the gauntlet, right down the middle of the two lines. Of course, there are two ways to do this, either passing an orange first (green last) or passing a green first (orange last). I would explore the specific ordering of the passes in many of the Circumnavigational puzzles, but in this case, I had hoped that people would try the (easier) green first and get stuck in the corridor, or try the (correct) orange first but get stuck in the top of the puzzle.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the original puzzle and its small alteration (what actually got printed in the column and posted here on my web site). You’ll notice that the green hexagon in the lower right got moved down so it was stuck between two orange hexagons.

Original

Revised

Why the change? Well, if you use looping, you can loop around that green hexagon and go straight to the finish dot, avoiding all of the hassles in the middle and bulk of the puzzle. Here’s what the original solution looked like (which is very similar to the actual solution):

And here’s the looped solution:

In order to prevent this looped solution, I moved the green hexagon in between the two orange hexagons and erased the hexagon that originally was the green one. If you tried to loop around the green hexagon now, you’d immediately hit a second orange hexagon. Here’s the actual solution again so that you can try it out for yourself: