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I created this gogen puzzle myself:

A 5x5 grid of circles that are connected to their horizontal, vertical, and diagonal neighbors by lines. Each of the odd numbered rows has a letter in each of the circles in odd-numbered columns. The first row has M, G, and D; the third row has W, L, and Y; and the fifth row has S, J, and B.

Add the 25 letters between A and Y to the grid above. Each one should appear exactly once. When you have finished, you must be able to spell the following words moving horizontally, vertically or diagonally around the grid:

ACQUIRE, AXLE, CUT, DERV, FIR, JUST, KEG, MAN, PILE, PRY, ROB, WHAM.

Bass
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International DBA
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  • Thanks for resolving. It looks like an interesting puzzle, changed my downvote into an upvote. – Joe Kerr Feb 17 '22 at 00:10
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    I hate how the lines are not perfectly horizontal and vertical xD – Ivo Feb 17 '22 at 07:34
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    A good point from Ivo Beckers about the lines. I created this puzzle some time ago. If I remember correctly I made it as an image on my Google drive and it was not possible to get the lines horizontal and vertical. I will be attending to this before creating many more of these puzzles. – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 09:08
  • Can you spell words right-to-left, and bottom-to-top, and I assume turning any direction as needed? – Tony Ennis Feb 17 '22 at 20:16
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    Tony: Left to right, right to left, downwards, upwards, diagonally and turning too. Love the blog by the way, especially the picture of the lathe. – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 22:37

1 Answers1

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What a nice, relaxing puzzle. +1, would solve again on my next coffee break.

Finished grid first:

enter image description here

Deductions used:

  • E is next to both D and L, so it can be placed.

  • R is next to E, and it needs to be able to reach the B in ROB, so the R is placed.

  • A is next to M, and it must have at least 4 unknown neighbours to house all of C,X,N and H. So the A is placed.

  • with CXNH around the A, ACQUIRE won't fit onto the three top rows anymore, so the C is placed.

  • Now WHAM places the H

enter image description here

  • AXLE disambiguates the N an X around the A

  • U must me adjacent to C, J and S, so it's placed.

  • ACQUIRE now places the Q and I

enter image description here

  • the T in JUST is now forced

  • P must be adjacent to both I and R, so it is placed

  • O in ROB is now forced

  • which in turn forces the V in derv (which is some sort of diesel vehicle, it seems)

  • the K in KEG has only one spot left

  • and even without using the remaining clue (FIR) we know the final empty spot must house the final missing letter, F.

Finally, as an improvement suggestion for the presentation: if you put the clue words to the right of the grid, and the alphabet below it (with the given letters already crossed out), it's much easier to work the puzzle, whether in printed form or in graphics software.

Here's what it might look like:

enter image description here
This image contains a puzzle that's made by user @international-dba, so it's not PD. OP can of course use it freely.

I couldn't get the pre-crossed-out letters look nice, so I left that thing out. Here's a link to the empty grid I drew for it with GD. As you can see, it's quite heavily aliased, but scaling it down will antialias it for you, so I couldn't be bothered to redo it properly. Feel free to use it in any way you like. (Whoever you are. All my own work here is PD by default.)

Bass
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    (I suspect the downvotes are an artefact of the puzzle originally being a link-only and not self-contained - now that all the information has been presented in the question I suspect the votes will largely be retracted or reversed...) – Stiv Feb 16 '22 at 09:43
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    @Stiv Looks like you are correct, a couple of them have already disappeared. IMO, a downvote is a very bad substitute for a VTC. Removed the remark from the question, as the puzzle is already in the "earning badges" level of points, as it should. – Bass Feb 16 '22 at 21:24
  • Thank you for the finished grid. I will publish this below my own answer this evening. – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 09:11
  • Interesting that you did not have to use the remaining clue (FIR). I never thought about that. I create these puzzles manually, which can take 2 or 3 hours then I run them through a C program, which I wrote myself. This takes a second or two and checks for a unique solution. – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 09:22
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    I have just seen the problem with the remaining clue (FIR). I ran my program without it and it refused to run because there was no letter F in the other words so it never got as far as checking for a unique solution. – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 09:32
  • I understand why you wanted me to post the puzzle rather than just a link. Would it be acceptable in future to post a puzzle plus a link which people could use to see similar puzzles? – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 09:35
  • Ignore my last question about posting a link. Although I don't believe I have ever posted here before, I have occasionally posted elsewhere on Stack Exchange. I notice that I already have a profile partly set up. I will update my details accordingly as I see that they point to a blog which I hardly ever use now. – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 09:45
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    @InternationalDBA if you have questions about how this site works, what's acceptable, what the rules are, etc. you can ask on [meta] – bobble Feb 17 '22 at 14:43
  • Linking to other sites is often seen as advertising, which is usually frowned upon. (The frosty initial reception must have very clearly demonstrated this.) However, you can definitely link back to your own site in the (self-)attribution. Something along the lines of "this puzzle is of my own creation, it was originally published at [link]" is likely to go down well, since in that context, the link is helpful, relevant information rather than just an ad driving traffic to an external site. – Bass Feb 17 '22 at 17:59
  • In reply to Bass, this is where I originally posted this puzzle: https://andrewspuzzles.blogspot.com/2022/02/real-word-gogen-no-8.html I have updated the puzzle with all your suggestions and links back to this site. I will update the solution tomorrow with your solving method. Thank you for the blank grid. It is big enough to have good definition. When I first started publishing these puzzles, I tried to find an empty grid but they all came up so small that the definition was very poor. – International DBA Feb 17 '22 at 23:56
  • Bass: I have added your solving method to the answer I published on my blog. I especially liked your way of placing the A. Regarding DERV, it was once an acronym for Diesel Engine Road Vehicle. That was before my time but I do remember when I first started driving in the 1970s that diesel fuel was often referred to as DERV. – International DBA Feb 18 '22 at 23:28