Miscellaneous Solutions That Didn't Deserve Their Own Posts

Sometimes polyomino-related things have a decent story behind them (or, failing that, a really boring story that can be stretched out to blog-post proportions.) But sometimes they don't. Today it's a selection of the latter; digitised solution pictures that were just sat around cluttering up the folder named 'BLOG STUFF' on my desktop, to tide me over while I write up some actually half-decent posts.

Rhombus with Hexominoes

Difficulty level: Mild (approx. two chilies out of five)

I've seen this, or variations of it, done before so it's not really particularly groundbreaking as solutions go (although really, are any of them that groundbreaking?) Including it here because it was a hard-won battle - I kept building the edges wrong, accidentally adding in steps of size 1 or 3 then not realising until right near the end when I was left with an internal hole whose size wasn't a multiple of six.

Heptomino Rectangle with 21 Holes

Difficulty level: Breakin' a Sweat

Solved the middle first, since the closely-packed holes are quite restricting on what pieces can even go there. But then the rest just solved like a normal heptomino construction and I've banged on about those at length in other posts so it wasn't really worth doing another one.

And the harbour heptomino doesn't need to be in the very centre of solutions like these, but it just feels wrong any other way.

5x45 rounded Rectangle with 11 Holes

Difficulty level: Real Tears

This was an utter nightmare, combining two of my worst fears into one shape: 5xn with hexominoes is always an ordeal, and adding that row of holes just pushes it over the edge into the kind of territory where it's actually frustrating and unpleasant to solve. You can see by the way the eight pieces with 2x2 blocks in them are scattered all over the shop that my usual solving technique only got me so far before I was left to fend for myself, desperately applying trial-and-error for several hours of my life I'll never get back.

Recommendation: FlatPoly2 can probably crack this one in under 10 seconds, just do that instead.

Stay tuned, next time I might actually have something a bit more substantial.