Please, please click on the advertisement above so I can feel like I'm making Keenspace some money with this and can therefore feel less guilty about using their servers to host it!

Logorinth Instructions

The goal of the logorinth is to find an unbroken chain of words, starting at the upper left hand corner of the grid and ending at the lower right, that passes through every square in the grid at least once. Each word has to begin on the same square as the last one ended, and to be spelled out by consecutive letters in a straight line going horizontally, vertically, or diagonally (45 degrees only, please). Only ordinary English words are allowed, no abbreviations, proper nouns, foreign words, or any words that normally include hyphens, apostrophes, or diacriticals. (And all common words, too. The logorinths shouldn't require you to know any of those obscure words that nobody ever uses outside crossword puzzles and Scrabble games.) Oh, yeah... and all the words have to be at least three letters long. Furthermore, you can't use the same word twice in one logorinth, though you can reuse one word's letters in other words - you can even go over the same letters in the opposite order to form another word if you want. You just can't repeat the same word (whether or not you use the same squares to do it.)

Oh... and the blank squares. See, we thought just finding a path of words through the grid might be too easy, so we decided to complicate things by removing a few of the letters. Then we thought that might have made it too hard, so we decided to tell you what letters we removed. They're there below the grid. Of course, you'll have to decide which letter goes where. And no switching once they're in place - you can't decide a given square is a T on one pass and then an R the next time you cross it. By the way, every word in the final path should pass through at least one of the blank squares. (Well, except that after you've solved it, the squares won't be blank anymore, will they?)

A logorinth may have more than one solution, but if it does, I don't know about it. I can guarantee each logorinth here has at least one solution, though,

To help clarify things, here's an example. Consider this logorinth:

Here's a solution (the only solution, as far as I know, but I could be wrong):

Notice that, as I said before, that the path starts at the upper left and ends at the lower right, that every square is used at least once (most more than once, in fact), and that every word begins where the last one ended. In case you're having trouble following the red line, here's the string of words the path follows: MOAT, TEES, SEE, EARS, SOD, DAM, MUSE, ERA, ARE, EAST. All common English words three letters long or longer, just like I said, and all of them passing through at least one of the formerly blank squares.

Now, like I said before, this is a brand new type of puzzle, so I'd like to know what you think. Too easy? Too hard? Should we not tell you what letters we took out of the grids? Or would the puzzles have been hard enough if we hadn't taken any letters out of the grids in the first place? Is this a kind of puzzle you'd be interested in seeing more of in future installments? Please, let me know!

Slapdash is hosted on Keenspace, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.