Bracket Puzzles

Last year, I became interested in designing my own type of paper-and-pencil puzzle after playing Dungeons & Diagrams on Last Call BBS. The best I’ve come up with is Brackets:

Partition a given polyomino¹ into brackets. A bracket is a polyomino consisting of a 1-by-n spine (n ≥ 3) with two 1-by-m legs (m ≥ 1) sticking off either end of the spine in the same direction.

As an example, here is a puzzle and its solution:

Here are two more puzzles, both of which have only one solution:

I’m not sure if it is feasible for a human to solve these puzzles by hand. At least, I haven’t been able to solve these two puzzles without a computer, and I haven’t come up with any useful deduction rules.

13 March 2025

---